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Annotated TIMELINE
Annotated Bibliography
(Can't believe Im out here using Times New Roman)
Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke University Press, 2003.
I strongly connect with Cvetkovich’s point that her personal life is completely intertwined with her intellectual life. That feels exactly like what I am doing here. She writes that queerness puts pressure on “conventional forms of documentation, representation, and commemoration,” which means that queer archives often end up being unstable or “unsustainable.” They are not built from official records but from things that are not designed to last: memories, photos, videos, journals, and unfinished projects.
This is the spirit of the Jackie Soleil archive. These materials were not created to become an archive. They are simply the traces of a queer life that I am gathering after the fact. Cvetkovich notes that “gay and lesbian cultures often leave ephemeral and unusual traces,” - It becomes a collection of moments, aesthetics, performances, and relationships that do not fit into a neat or institutional form.
The genesis of Jackie Soleil is a lived experience, and archiving those traces is “ frequently inadequate to the task of documentation.”
Jackie
Rating:
8/10
Gopinath, Gayatri. Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Duke University Press, 2018.
The introduction to Unruly Visions is basically a love letter to queer ways of seeing the world. It states that curating a quuer archive is an act of caring and a pursuit to “document, analyze, archive and value the small, the inconsequential and the ephemeral.” (4) It celebrates the unruly, messy, the sideways glance that refuses the stuffy posture of the official archive. That is exactly the energy of jackiesoleil.com - My archive is not interested in being respectable.
Gopinath insists that visual culture can build worlds that do not yet exist. The whole point of the Soleil Archive is to build a world that is brighter, queerer, and far more dramatic than anything a traditional archive could handle. These scraps and images and performances are not arranged to please an academic. They are arranged to please ME, and to give anyone who wanders in a little taste of what a Jackie future might look like.
The introduction also gives me permission to treat beauty and spectacle as real knowledge. Thank you. I have been saying this for years. The rhinestones, the outfits, the videos, the poses, even the broken memories are all part of the thinking. Gopinath makes the case that aesthetics can be a theory. My work takes that seriously. I am building a counter archive through glamour, chaos, and visual pleasure. The archive is not neat. It is not proper. It is a queer vision, and it knows exactly how gorgeous it is.
Jackie
Rating:
7/10
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14.
The subject matter is heavy, and my little Jackie Archive is nowhere near those stakes, but her ideas help me think about what to do with gaps and silences. Hartman examines the violence of the archive
( and the silence of the archive) and the lives it refuses to record. She offers critical fabulation as a way to imagine around what is missing, which feels close to how Im working with my fragments and ephemera. She asks “How can the narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know?” which makes me wonder about being Archivist and Archived, and what determines what is or is not known.
The real takeaway is that an archive does not need to be complete to matter. It can be partial or flimsy, it can imagine what could have been, as long as it knows what is lost and tries to create something honest around it. That is the spirit I am borrowing for the Soleil Archive.
Jackie
Rating:
6/10
McCann, Hannah, and Whitney Monaghan. Queer Theory Now. Red Globe Press, 2020.
Phew, this book is dense. It really does haul you through the whole landscape of queer thought, giving enough depth that I feel oriented without drowning in jargon soup. They aren’t here to reinvent the wheel, and that’s honestly fine, the point is to lay out the major moves of queer theory so a girl like me can trace the lineage while still keeping her lashes glued on.
The chapter asides do their best to translate theory into lived experience. Sometimes they sparkle, sometimes they feel like they’re trying a little too hard to be relatable, but I appreciate the ambition. I do wish the book skewed a bit younger in its examples; the tone leans academic grand dame when I’m craving downtown basement drag. Still, it’s a solid, comprehensive map of where queer theory has been and what tools it hands me as I build my own world.
Still, it’s useful for situating myself in the big messy tent of queer thought. If nothing else, it gives Jackie Soleil a map of the discourse - just don’t expect her to stay on the marked trails.
Jackie
Rating:
7/10
Moore, Madison. Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric. Yale University Press, 2018.
“Perhaps one of the greatest creative gifts of marginalized people and social outcasts is that power of abstraction” (5), or as the chapter later puts it, the art of “merging things together in unexpected ways” (15). I’m trying to harness that same abstraction myself and approach Queer Theory from the Soleil point of view. It is also the reason I have a mustache. This article would absolutely call me a queer renegade for that, bending the rules of socially accepted appearance and enjoying every second of it.
This chapter is about the Fabulous and how eccentric style gets staged in performance and in everyday life. On page 8 there is a truly iconic list of the traits of Fabulousness, all of which I ascribe to, but which are way too long to retype here. Look it up. It is basically a checklist for why Jackie Soleil exists.
The big takeaway is the “glorious power of abstraction” (12). This is the ability to bend and reframe something to fit your personal queer world through eccentricity, fantasy, futurism, and the wild nature of a fabulous aesthetic. Part of that power comes from generating conflicting signals that intentionally confuse and disrupt heterosexual society simply by being too much, too contradictory, too alive.
There is also a perfect quote here from Jack Halberstam’s The Art of Queer Failure. Being taken seriously often means missing out on frivolity, promiscuity, and irrelevance. These are three things I consider artistic nutrients. With this site I am trying to make choices that illicit Fabulousness while also being frivolous, eccentric, and antagonistic. I am merging the Jackie Soleil Archive with queer theory to create something capital F fabulous.
Jackie
Rating:
8/10
Muñoz, José Esteban. “Ephemera as Evidence.” Women and Performance, vol. 8, no. 2, 1996, pp. 5–16.
Some good material in this chapter. “Queerness has existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances,” and “Queer acts, like queer performances and various performances of queerness, stand as evidence of queer lives, powers, and possibilities” (6). My life is documented in gossip, half-remembered promises, and nightclub promo flyers. These are all evidence of my existence. There is no breadcrumb trail to follow, because I got hungry on the way. I am remembered by the smell of my perfume and the cigarette butts I leave behind. Munoz suggests that when we emphasize the experimental and performative aspects of our work, we leave ourselves open to charges of being ahistorical or flimsy. I accept those charges. Bring them on. Welcome to my flimsy archive. Who is going to tell me I am wrong. I am the only one who remembers.
Munoz also states that archives of queerness are makeshift and randomly organized, and that queer acts contest and rewrite the protocols of critical writing. I am choosing to make my website archive embrace these ideas. The archive will hold “traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things” (10) in an effort to subvert and contest academic standards and rigid rules of what an archive is supposed to be. I want to avoid what Munoz calls “the deadly impulse towards stale seriousness” (13). That feels like the true kiss of death for Jackie Soleil.
There is so much more in this piece. It is a real motivator to get me out of my boudoir and into my thinking chair. I am confident that my strange handful of queer material is a perfectly suitable archive of Jackie Soleil, as complete or incomplete as it chooses to be.
Jackie
Rating:
7/10
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press, 2009.
The introduction states that we can glimpse worlds promised by queerness in the aesthetic realm, which contains "blueprints and schemata for a future yet to come". Munoz teaches that queerness is always a horizon, something we reach toward rather than fully capture. If I am both archivist and archived, the Jackie Soleil archive becomes a record of that reaching. It shows a drag self in motion, never complete, always shimmering toward a future version of herself. But then the introduction lost my interest, so I skipped it.
Munoz argues that queerness is not yet here, but a potentiality. For some reason, I, Jackie Soleil, feel like a not-quite-here, a potential for something fabulous that does not always exist. Huh. Straight time suggests there is no future beyond the here and now, yet I can radically shift the future by slipping on a six-inch pump. Fredric Jameson calls the utopian the oddball or the maniac, which are easy descriptors for my blog musings. By stepping out of straight time and into ecstatic time, maybe by getting into drag, we can begin to see queerness as a utopian horizon. Munoz also reminds us that queerness thrives in the “then and there,” which means my archive can point toward a world I have not yet made while still playing in the one I have already built. I'm not sure how helpful this will ultimately be. Or maybe I just hated reading it.
Jackie
Rating:
3/10
Shumake, Jessica. “Archival Research as a Queer Practice: ‘Pull Here.’” The Writing Instructor, March 2015
“It goes without saying that archives are not only places of pleasure and play in the here and now, but also complicated repositories for lost opportunities and missed connections” (4). The different sections of my website operate on this principle. The video archive is a pleasure dome of Jackie content. The memory log section engages with fragments of memory and queer experiences that only exist in the fog of the past. The archive becomes a living split between joy and loss, which feels exactly right for the world I am building.
“Archival projects typically manifest a compulsive desire for completeness” (1). I am intentionally queering and abstracting this idea. The Soleil Archives will never be complete. I am trying to withhold pleasure at the same time that I give it. This is unprecedented access to me, Jackie, and I need to maintain some air of mystery. Some videos will never be archived. Some incredible moments from New York City will never be remembered. The Theory tells me to embrace the fabulousness of an incomplete archive and let that incompleteness be part of the artwork.