A paradox animates the temporality of ephemera: its evanescence often coincides with a palpable momentousness. In “Ephemera as Evidence,” José Esteban Muñoz urges readers to recognize a related affinity between queer epistemological modes and the archival category of ephemera. “[L]eaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer subject has left herself open for attack,” Muñoz explains. Accordingly, “Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere—while evaporating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility.” And yet, it would be a mistake to read ephemeral expression, consequently, as a site of lack. Rather, ephemera, by virtue of its complex temporality, may be defined as that which queerly persists. In Muñoz’s words, “it is all of those things that remain after a performance, a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself....is instead interested in following traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things.”

Focusing on this persistence of ephemera—what Susan Zieger describes as the infusion of the “trivial, disposable material of everyday life” with lasting value—our panel explores the role ephemera plays in the history of sex. Sex and ephemera share a peculiar inclination toward temporalities that evade their purportedly climactic value. It is commonly said that the anticipation of sex is its most pleasurable state, while others are happiest when the lover leaves in the taxi. So can the preparatory pageantry of much ephemera carry more pleasure than its dissemination, whereas preservation in scrapbooks and shoeboxes speaks to the inalienability of its social value from the material text left behind. No mere coincidence, this affinity helps us understand the difficulty of locating sex in the archive alongside its evident ubiquity. The traces, glimmers, and residues scholars study speak to elusive modes of signification that frustrate our ability to access sexual expression as such. With a desire to better understand this relationship between archival records and the history of sex, we propose papers that endeavor to derive methods of reading sexual expression from the ephemeral forms that allow it to endure.

Our panelists explore methods for seeking and understanding the history of sexuality at the intersection of archival practice, affect, and ephemeral forms. Through an analysis of "vinegar valentines" and Mardi Gras ephemera, Sarah Salter theorizes print seriality as a collective ritual capable of illuminating the sexual dimensions of publishing practices. Omari Weekes explores the ephemeral poetics of Audre Lorde's correspondences with Black feminist writers Pat Parker and June Jordan, with the goal of revisiting refracted considerations of Mexico in Lorde's biomythography Zami as a key site of Black queer affective intensity. For Weekes, if poetry may be understood to construct relationality between lovers, amongst friends, and within community, Lorde's expressed inability to produce a poetics that would “infuse words directly with what I was feeling” prompts a critical distance that pushes up against the kind of ethical intersubjectivity that her theory of the erotic deems essential. Weekes reads Lorde's response to this crisis as an “erotics of opacity,” dependent on slow and fleeting disclosures, oblique referencing, and aesthetic inscrutability.

Don James McLaughlin's paper investigates the erotics of the envelope through the advent of its mass production. In the early nineteenth century, a postage system based on number of sheets used made additional wrappings cost prohibitive. Accordingly, many senders used the second leaf of a lettersheet folio to fold into a protective enclosure bearing the recipient’s address. When the Postal Act of 1845 introduced a new weight-based system, the modern diamond-shaped envelope came into vogue. Juxtaposing queer letters sent before and after this shift, McLaughlin proposes a theory of envelope erotics focused on postbellum authors who wrote notes and poems on envelopes themselves, thus positioning the surfaces and edges of receptive bodies as sites enabling new relational modes. Chip Badley concludes the panel by turning to twenty-first century slash erotica remixes of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, locating a radical transience in the decided partiality of most contemporary retellings--suspended in abandoned blogs, incomplete work-in-progress, and otherwise jettisoned projects. Much like the Pequod’s own sinking, these queer counterpublics speak to what Badley designate a “ship theory”: a mode of participatory consumption that flourishes in the pleasures of cursory encounters.

It is our plan for panelists to speak for 10-12 minutes to ensure at least 15 minutes for Q&A at the conclusion of the session.