Queer Archives, Queer Movements: The Visual and Bodily Archives of Vaginal Davis

Vaginal Davis is a former Los Angeles–based visual and performance artist who now lives and creates art in Berlin. Scholarly research on her work began to appear in the late nineties and has focused solely on her live, queer, performance art. But research on her queer archives (her studio-archives and her body/self as performing the archive) is missing, which is ironic, given that all her performances come from her various self-fabricated archives. Thus the author argues, among related ideas, that Davis is also a queer archivist—whose primary queer praxis is, in her words, “the indefinite nature of my own whimsy.” The author shows that Davis's performances and musical bands are the deployment of her body/self as an archive from which she creates, fabricates, and recycles images and minoritarian and subcultural oral histories to make other kinds of archives—ones that are different, and queerly so.