Oral History Without Words: Representing Activism’s Traumatic Dimensions

• In Event: Exceeding Analysis: Grappling with Queer Histories of Trauma

Abstract

By privileging the textual, oral history methods run the risk of occluding nonverbal forms of communication that are key to expressing traumatic histories. In this paper I draw on interviews I conducted with former members of Vanguard, a queer homeless youth activist organization founded in 1966, to show how close attention to the embodied, performative nature of the oral history encounter can help represent activism’s traumatic dimensions.

In 2012, I conducted oral histories with three former youth activists associated with the San Francisco-based Vanguard, which historians now claim as the nation’s first gay liberation organization. While I set out to collect data and construct a chronological organizational history, the intense stories my narrators related—ranging from accounts of childhood abuse to extrasensory and “mystical” experiences—seemed to exceed historical representation. My narrators’ ongoing efforts to manage trauma also suggested that Vanguard’s emotional dimensions were not limited to the past but erupted into the present, complicating and confusing my attempts to create a linear historical narrative.

In this paper I experiment with representational strategies inspired by performance studies and ethnographic theory in order to evoke something of Vanguard’s emotional and traumatic dimensions. Because theorists often consider trauma to be inexpressible and resistant to language, I shift my focus from the oral history text to nonverbal forms of communication during the oral history encounter—forms of communication including dance, poetic rhythms and sounds, and body language that express precisely that which words cannot. Drawing on Ann Cvetkovich’s conception of the oral history as an “archive of the emotions,” I argue that my narrators’ performativity during the oral history encounters offers limited evidence about the creative responses to trauma they forged through Vanguard.

Author

• Joey Plaster, Yale University American Studies