Mediated Storytelling Practices and Productions: Archival Bodies of Affective Evidences

Abstract

Video abstract Through hands-on work collecting digital video oral histories for the Arizona Queer Archives, bodies and bodies of knowledge in ongoing affective states of simultaneous becoming and unbecoming can be observed and encountered. Both interviewing and storytelling techniques in select oral histories are considered here to stress the salient and affective processes of mediation and (un)becoming that unfold in front of and behind the camera as part of the production of digital archival stories and subsequent access to streaming technologies. In order to explore the details of archival production, the oral history interview is understood here as a space of both intimate and public storytelling—an affective assemblage. This paper introduces archives as affective multimodalities that work to tenderly hold and structure bodies, technologies, and stories especially as these come together and apart in states of (un)becoming.