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Everyday Archives

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Intimate Investments in Drag King Cultures

Abstract

This chapter moves to consider how the ordinary affects that characterize scene participation might simultaneously endure in cultural memory. Viewed from the moment of their decline, scenes anticipate their retrospective formation from their backwards-facing position. By examining a social moment that starts to feel historical, this chapter explores how the elusiveness of social scenes prompts an imperative towards memorialization. The second half of the chapter links these processes more concretely to what the author has termed ethno-archivist methodologies. Anecdotes, and the ethnographic methodologies designed to capture them, work as an immaterial form of cultural exchange that simultaneously produces a sense of the eternal. Sydney’s drag king scene is presented as a lingering archive of lived experience, capable of taking on and transmitting shared social moods.

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Correspondence to Kerryn Drysdale .

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Drysdale, K. (2019). Everyday Archives. In: Intimate Investments in Drag King Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15777-7_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15777-7_6

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-15776-0

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