Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer History by Nan Alamilla Boyd, Horacio N. Roque Ramírez (review)

The fields of oral history and queer studies are each gaining academic and institutional traction in this new millennium, and Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Ramírez argue, in a book of essays they collected, edited, and published in 2012, titled Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History, that this is not a coincidence—that these emerging fields and methodologies inspire, critique, and sustain one another.

Their introduction and the chapters that follow make theoretical, historical, and methodological claims. However, Boyd and Roque Ramírez’s first intervention was in the type of book they decided to construct. They collected and edited chapters from fourteen established queer oral historians, each including a brief, transcribed oral history and a methodological reflection. The interviews are presented as raw data, with both questions and responses printed on the page in a journalistic style. Each oral historian then provides commentary that contextualizes, historicizes, and interprets this data. The collected narratives are fascinating and important, and the analysis offered is often thoughtful, challenging, even brilliant. I will say more about the book’s valuable contributions later, but first I will consider the book’s structure as a theoretical statement: Oral history’s contribution to the fields of queer studies, history, and ethnography is being characterised as the delivery and interpretation of data.

In the volume’s introduction, Boyd and Roque Ramírez cite our subfield’s founders as Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis (Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community [New York: Penguin Books, 1994]) on the one hand and Allan Bérubé (Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II [New York: Free Press, 1990]) on the other. These pioneers’ texts integrate their narratives into historical accounts, rather than present them as interviews qua interviews. Oral history’s relationships to community history and to anthropology are complicated, and connections with activism, popular history, museum studies, and identity politics weave through this field-building. Roque Ramírez and Boyd describe the potential space carved by this complicated intersection: “This book recognizes that an injustice has occurred and that those seeking justice sometimes have to create new methods. As such, queer oral histories have an overtly political function and a liberating quality” (1). Oral historians and our narrators are people acting in a world, with bodies, subjugations, interpretations, needs, and demands for justice.

Bodies of Evidence establishes disciplinary boundaries around a field with these priorities and possibilities while simultaneously drawing on queer studies and theory. Individual speakers, collective identities, structures of state power—all are critiqued even as they are invoked and challenged. Roque Ramírez and Boyd claim that oral historians do not stop with data collection, but also “shift our analytical lens to an engaged and critical analysis of the narrative structures, living exchanges, ways of remembering, detailed contents, and interactions across differences in our work with queer oral histories” (6). The editors are engaged in a delicate balancing act that privileges data collection by people with bodies and histories from people with bodies and histories; lively, sexual, contextualized, archivable, messy data is the really cool thing that we bring to the table, yet the authors remind us that we cannot do so with a naïve sense of what it means to have a body, a sex, a story—or a table to which to bring it all, for that matter.

Queer oral history, as Boyd and Roque Ramírez present it, has an origin story: In the beginning, we needed oral evidence, because there was no other data—there was no archive, there was no other way to learn about our past. So Jonathan Katz, Bérubé, Lillian Faderman, John D’Emilio, Esther Newton, and others collected stories from the actors and shaped our history from these stories. Oral historians collecting stories now are...