Being Close to, With or Amongst

There is an oft-touted thought, which has perhaps fallen into adage for its authorlessness, that women carry archives in their bodies. It seems a romantic or old-fashioned thought—that bodies can be ‘a witness, testament and document’ and so are sites of history-making (Schneider, 2019). It is a thought that has been swept aside by an epistemological framework that has come to dominate how it is we know. And so, as a challenge to this, an ‘act of love against the foreclosures of reason’ (Singh, 2018, p. 29), I went looking for archival bodies.