Trans archives, poetics and sensitive experiences

Abstract

This article proposes to rethink the concept of archive, from a transfeminist perspective, in three contemporary works, with different supports: the film Madame Satã by Karim Aïnouz, the exhibition “We were always there” organized by the Trans Memory Archive, located in the Centro Cultural Haroldo Conti, and the novel Las malas by Camila Sosa Villada. We understand that these three cultural artifacts problematize the archive device by engaging in a poetic-political discussion necessary to question the crystallized images of transvestite subjectivities that emerge from the police sections, medical reports, and/or the carnival. Thus, from the first years of the 21st century to the end of the first decade, from Brazil to Argentina, from visual art to literature, the series is based on the urgency of building a new archive for the transvestite community, removing their bodies from exceptionalism and contesting a new visibility guided by the everyday and the affective. However, we will maintain that this new distribution of the visible does not imply the erasure of exclusion. Neither victims nor criminals, they are survivors who also show themselves as affective, desiring, historical subjects, inserted in a materially imagined community. That is why the archive created must account for the norm and violence, answer it, run it against the grain, project new sensations and trace alternative identities and bodies.