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Australian Feminist Studies

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INTRODUCTION
Susan Stryker
Published online: 20 May 2010.

To cite this article: Susan Stryker (2010) INTRODUCTION, Australian Feminist Studies, 25:64,
105-108, DOI: 10.1080/08164641003746399

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 INTRODUCTION
Bodies of Knowledge: Embodiment and the
Archival Imaginary

Susan Stryker

Infinite storage, perfect search*these are the terms that characterise one powerful
fantasy of the conditions of knowledge in the current Age of Google; they describe an
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archival imaginary whose logic informs every urgent or casual query we pose via our
increasingly networked, mobile, and rapidly proliferating points of entry into the
infosphere. Where is the closest place to buy an asthma inhaler this time of night? Did
the Ordovician geological period precede or follow the Silurian? What is the etymology of
the word ‘happen’? Is that song by the Raincoats or the Slits? Is the sushi restaurant over
there any good? We assume that our questions are intelligible, that the answers we seek
can be found somewhere out there, that what we want to know is actually retrievable. Or,
if it is not, it soon will be.
Knowledge presents itself within this archival imaginary as disembodied, circulating
through the platform(s) du jour between our desire to know and a virtual elsewhere whence
it emanates. And yet, as a long history of feminist, queer and people-of-colour critique has
taught us, desire is never incorporeal. It is always enmeshed in the specificities of some
particular flesh and the technologies through which embodied subjects encounter, make,
and unmake their various objects, environments, and selves. Knowledge is never purely
ideal, but rather always material, partial, situated, motivated, invested. The archival
imaginary that structures our knowledge and enables our desire is always embodied.
A case in point: 280 kilometres (175 miles) east of the mouth of the Columbia River,
on the Pacific coast of North America, in the US State of Oregon, about one and a half
hour’s drive from the city of Portland, a roadside sign near the tiny river-front town of The
Dalles welcomes travellers to ‘Googleville’. In 2006, the ubiquitous online search
behemoth quietly purchased a parcel of land there, and launched a secretive initiative
known at first only as ‘Project 02’. The company acknowledged in 2008 what it initially had
sworn locals not to disclose, but what outside observers had long suspected: that ‘Project
02’ was a massive ‘server farm’, a corporate data centre whose two hangar-sized buildings
house untold thousands of computers*of the estimated million-plus worldwide that form
Google’s computational infrastructure*that service billions of search queries every day.
Drawing more than 100 megawatts of power, Google’s data centre at The Dalles consumes
the energy equivalent of a city of several hundred thousand people.
The geographical location of ‘Googleville’ is no accident; or, rather, the accidents of
geography are precisely what have determined the centre’s location. The Dalles marks the
point at which the Columbia River, whose immense watershed drains much of the
northwestern United States and parts of Canada, descends from a vast, high inland plateau
and cuts its way towards the sea through the Columbia River Gorge. Situated immediately
adjacent to a reliable source of water power, complete with dam and hydroelectric

Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 25, No. 64, June 2010

ISSN 0816-4649 print/ISSN 1465-3303 online/10/020105-04
– 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/08164641003746399
 106 SUSAN STRYKER

generating station, Google’s server farm at The Dalles recapitulates, in twenty-first-century

fashion, the rationale of a nineteenth-century industrial mill. Moreover, rural land is cheap,
and local labour is under-employed. High-speed fibre optic cables laid during the dot-com
boom of the 1990s, and acquired for cents on the dollar in the ensuing bust, make nearby
Portland a hub for the principal trans-Pacific telecommunication links between Asia and
Australia to North America. High-tech centres like Seattle and San Francisco, and Google
headquarters in Silicon Valley, are short corporate jet flights away. The facility at The Dalles
is one of roughly two dozen such data centres operated by Google around the world
(Markoff and Hansell 2006; Strand 2008).
The point being: however ethereal the Internet appears to be from a consumer point
of view (and however reinforced this perspective is by industry buzz-phrases like ‘cloud
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computing’ for the shift from PC- and laptop-based software applications towards server-
based applications that depend on bricks-and-mortal facilities like those at The Dalles), the
‘archival imaginary’ in which we increasingly live is firmly rooted in a gross materiality
whose particular embodied location(s) are its necessary preconditions of possibility.
To characterise the planet-spanning, environment-altering infrastructure of the global
telecommunications network as a form of embodiment does more than make a suggestive
parallel between that macro-level organisation of contemporary material reality and our
own individual corporealities. It asserts a connection that crosses the accustomed divide of
experiencing subject and objective world, and invites the recognition of our own
embodiments as micro-level nodes and relays through which a new ecology of information
circulates. Bodies of knowledge and knowledge of bodies: each recursively informs the other.
The articles collected in this issue of Australian Feminist Studies all bear some
relationship to the 2007 conference ‘Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality in the Archive’
sponsored by the Centre for the History of European Discourses (CHED) at the University of
Queensland, due in no small measure to the generous support and encouragement of

FIGURE 1
Roadside sign near The Dalles, Oregon (USA), location of a massive Google ‘server farm’.
(Photo credit: Ron Sipherd, 2007; used with permission via Creative Commons. Photo source:
Bhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/ronsipherd/1891078816.)
 INTRODUCTION 107

CHED Director Peter Cryle. All the articles address, in their own fashions, some relationship
between embodiment and archives. They tend to draw on recent, as well as longer
established, scholarship on what we are calling the ‘archival imaginary’*the theoretical
work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault; the ‘new archival studies’ spearheaded by
Antoinette Burton, Tony Ballantyne, Carolyn Steedman, and others; as well as con-
temporary queer/feminist thinkers whose projects are as diverse, and yet as compatible,
as Anjali Arondekar, Anne Cvetkovitch, and Sara Ahmed.
In the lead article, ‘The Counter-archive of Elizabeth Nielsen’, Rebekah Edwards
explicates and analyses the archival traces left behind, a century ago, by the multi-layered
relationship between criminal investigator James Forbes and Elizabeth Nielson, a reputed
‘adventuress’ with whom Forbes had become obsessed. In doing so, Edwards explores the
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manner in which the movements of the material body through space and time can
generate a ‘counter-archive’ coterminous with, but destabilising of, a ‘state’ archive that
gathers together, with disciplinary intent, inscriptions of the regulatory practices directed
at that very body. In her article ‘Archiving Gifts’, contributor Jessica Cadwallader, like
Edwards, uses an individual case study*that of Emily Sanford, a woman who underwent
limb-lengthening surgery to treat congenital achondroplasia (dwarfism)*to explore the
‘archival imaginary’. Cadwallader’s work directly engages the Australian tradition in
feminist philosophies of the body. After elaborating the archival metaphor implied by
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body as a ‘sedimentation’ of practices that record and store
the body’s lived history, Cadwallader applies and extends the insights of Rosalyn Diprose
to suggest ways in which embodiment functions as an ‘archive of corporeal gifts*some
memorialised and others forgotten’.
Elizabeth Stephens, who co-organised the ‘Bodies of Knowledge’ conference and co-
edited this issue, approaches the theme of embodiment and the archival imaginary by
investigating the history and provenance of various gynaemorphic waxwork models used
as anatomical displays in sensational itinerant entertainment shows between the
eighteenth and early twentieth centuries in her article ‘Venus in the Archive’. Stephens
discusses several surviving ‘anatomical Venuses’, but focuses special attention on the late
nineteenth-century ‘Pregnant Venus’ representing a woman undergoing a Caesarean
section, once featured prominently in Pierre Spitzner’s Grand Museum of Anatomy and
Hygiene, the remnants of which were rediscovered in a Parisian warehouse in the 1970s.
Stephens interprets these archived representations of female embodiment to offer insight
into the shifting medical and specular technologies through which embodiment has been
perceived in the recent history of the West.
Sally Newman’s ‘Sites of Desire: Reading the Lesbian Archive’ offers a thoughtful
first-person account of the ways in which the desire of the researcher always informs, and
sometimes obscures, what she encounters in the archive. Writing on lesbian life in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at Smith College, an elite all-women institution in
New England, Newman initially was eager to interpret the photographs she found in the
college archive of female-bodied people dressing in masculine attire while holding ‘Man
Dances’ and ‘Mock Weddings’ as evidence of her research subjects’ lesbian desire. Only as
she struggled with issues of interpretation, however, did Newman begin to question
whether the images she invested with lesbian significance might not signify instead
something quite different from female same-sex eroticism; and whether the only lesbian
desire at the archival site belonged to her alone. Maryanne Dever, in ‘Greta Garbo’s Foot’,
recounts an interpretive dilemma diametrically opposed to Newman’s. Dever’s own desire
 108 SUSAN STRYKER

is a necessary component of her research in the recently opened papers of Spanish-born

aristocrat-cum-screenwriter Mercedes Acosta, who was widely regarded as having had a
short-lived affair with the famously reclusive screen star Greta Garbo. Pushing back against
the heterocentric and homophobic conditions that produce gaps and elisions in the two
women’s correspondence, Dever unselfconsciously speculates about the story that might
connect the fragmentary evidence of bodily passions that confronts her in the archive:
Garbo’s bare foot traced on a sheet of paper; a lipstick kiss on a pair of socks; stockings
that belonged to Garbo’s rival, Marlene Dietrich. Emile Devereaux advances a similar
argument in ‘Doctor Alan Hart: X-ray Vision in the Archive’. Hart was a pioneering early
twentieth-century radiologist and science fiction author who may have been the first
person in the United States to undergo medical and legal sex reassignment from female to
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male. Devereaux claims that Hart destroyed all visible trace of his gender transition, yet
deliberately left archival clues to his atypical biography that could be read by those with
a metaphorical ‘X-ray vision’ capable of detecting the signs that Hart posted.
Brenda Weber’s ‘Talking Sex, Talking Kinsey: Discursive Bodies and Sexual Behavior in
the Human Female’ is a methodologically straightforward article. Weber relies on a pre-
constituted ‘body of knowledge’ in a well-established traditional archive: nearly 19,000
newspaper clippings, bound in 74 volumes, that exhaustively chronicle the media’s
coverage of famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and which are available in the archives of
the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. Weber uses this source to track the reception of
Kinsey’s book on female sexuality, published in 1953, in rural, small-town, and provincial
cities in the United States. In contrast, the final contribution to this issue, ‘Everywhere
Archives: Transgendering, Trans Asians, and the Internet’ by Mel Chen, explores the
manner in which Internet archives, rather than constituting a pre-existing body of
knowledge, are in fact constituted by their search terms. Chen explores the play between
spectacularity and invisibility in several different archives related to Asian female-to-male
trans embodiment: ‘pregnant man’ Thomas Beatie; DIY gender-transition video blogs
posted on YouTube by ‘Zack’; and conceptual artist Lee Mingwei. Chen discusses how the
virtual, viral, and evanescent nature of these Internet archives*precisely because they
must be actively constituted by users over and over again*function not as moribund
repositories but as generative resources for identity construction.

REFERENCES
MARKOFF, JOHN, and SAUL HANSELL.2006. Hiding in plain sight, Google seeks more power. New
York Times, 14 June. Available from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/technology/
14search.html
STRAND, GINGER. 2008. Keyword: Evil. Harper’s Magazine (March): 6465. Available from http://
harpers.org/media/slideshow/annot/2008-03

Susan Stryker is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University*

Bloomington (USA). She is the author, most recently, of Transgender History (Seal
Press, 2008).