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In An Archive of Feelings, literary scholar Ann Cvetkovich takes on the ambitious task of reworking current and historical conceptualizations of trauma from the vantage point of lesbian countercultural formations. Drawing on a vast array of primary texts, including oral histories of lesbian AIDS activists, writings on butch-femme sexuality, and feminist performance pieces on immigration, and placing these alongside personal reflections, Freudian psychoanalytic theory, feminist self-help literature, contemporary psychiatric texts, and poststructuralist queer, feminist and critical race theory, Cvetkovich gives pride of place to a body of lesbian experiences that has traditionally been neglected within trauma studies. Cvetkovich's aspiration in the book is not so much to lend legitimacy to lesbian trauma or to advocate for its admittance into the canon of trauma studies, but rather - and more provocatively - to demonstrate how a consideration of contemporary lesbian art and activism might “give rise to different ways of thinking about trauma” (p 3).
An Archive of Feelings represents a crucial feminist and queer intervention into the field of trauma studies, a field that has, over the past decade, become increasingly dominated by a focus on massive world historical events. This emphasis on the exceptional, the colossal, and the global has obscured the powerful roles of the quotidian and the domestic in structuring psychic experience and public life. Cvetkovich's text seeks to redress this problem by enlarging the focus of trauma studies to include a broader variety of experience and by calling for a more persistent and sustained critique of “what counts as a trauma history and whose feelings matter in the national sphere” (p 37). In addition, the book invokes lesbian subcultural practices in order to mount a challenge to the tendency within contemporary scholarship and activism to pit therapeutic and political activist responses to trauma against one another, and thus c