Historical Trauma, Queer Sex, and Physical Touch in Barbara Hammer’s Nitrate Kisses

For lesbian-feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer, “making up” lost queer history in the absence of conventional archives is a material and embodied process seen in her experimental documentary Nitrate Kisses (1992). This film centres around different queer couples portraying various erotic, physical and sexual acts. Each of these acts are aligned with voice-over interviews and visual archival ephemera detailing particular historical traumas, including the AIDS crisis and the erasure of lesbian experiences from life narratives of Holocaust survivors. I argue that the body and various erotic acts in Nitrate Kisses become sites of consciousness and cognition employed in the recovery of traumatic memory. As I explore, it is physical touch—sexual and erotic touch in particular—that acts as a conduit for accessing lost or purposefully invisibilized archival knowledge. Employing Elizabeth Freeman’s erotohistoriography, I argue that sex and other forms of physical touch in Hammer’s film become a method of remembering historical injustices, making them visible through an embodied queer-feminist archival practice in order for the viewer to bear witness to trauma that has shaped queer cultural memory. 
This article contains images of nudity and sexual behaviour.

playful, spirited sex while the voice-over features interviews with different gay men outlining the impact of the Motion Picture Production Code on gay male life. Later in the phase, men share personal stories of loss experienced during the AIDS crisis. Phase III features two young, punk women (leather dykes) engaging in BDSM sex, as voice-over narratives and photographs piece together the stories of queer women who were purposefully disappeared from greater historical narratives of life experiences in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. In each phase, archival materials frame the erotic encounters, providing a means of sensing, feeling and witnessing pain.
Observing the sex scenes in Hammer's experimental documentary compels me to argue that queer sex can become an archival practice of both remembering and processing violence and death. Indeed, the limits of our corporeal boundaries can be tested and redrawn through the various acts of queer sex in Nitrate Kisses, reconfiguring past traumas and pain for queer people. Hammer must employ the erotic body as an archive because she is working in the absence of conventional archives to transmit knowledge about queer loss, trauma, and death across generations. 1 I argue that Nitrate Kisses thus employs the erotic body to achieve three main objectives: (1) to reinscribe the past in the present, specifically within and upon the flesh of her performers; (2)  for the viewer to bear witness to trauma that has shaped queer cultural memory. In Nitrate Kisses, the body is not a stable object, perhaps not even a "body" at all; rather, it becomes representative of a "figure for relations between bodies past and present." 2 In my analysis of queer bodies and sex in Nitrate Kisses, I engage historian Elizabeth Freeman's methodological erotohistoriography, which understands the body as a tool to write the "lost" or the past into the present. For Freeman, erotic pleasure is a means of understanding and knowing -a form of "historical consciousness intimately involved with corporeal sensations." 3 In Nitrate Kisses, the past is inscribed upon the moving bodies as they have sex. Thus, paradoxically, death is inscribed or imprinted upon the living in the moment of copulation, and upon and through their pleasure.
My analysis of trauma as unfolding and transforming through the act of sex is critical because it reads queer sex directly against narratives depicting queer desire ending in death.
As Heather Love maintains, "the history of Western representation is littered with the corpses of sexual and gender deviants." 4 The depiction of lesbian love as tragic, isolated, and concluding in death is widely reflected in historical cinematic representations of lesbian life. Such notorious films include Mädchen in Uniform (1931), which concludes with an attempted suicide on part of a queerly coded schoolgirl, and The Children's Hour (1961), in which a similarly coded protagonist hangs herself. In this essay, I use a framework of erotics which positions the pleasuring/pleasured queer body against its antithesis: the murdered, tortured or vanished queer body. Mid "procreation" or "reproduction," the bodies in Nitrate Kisses promise a kind of queer futurityif not biological or genetic, a powerfully symbolic form of futurity. According to my method of analysis, then, mass queer historical death or erasure is neither overlooked nor shied away from, nor does it play a starring role in consuming the bodies at the heart of this research. I will begin by briefly summarising sex and the body as both relate to the tradition of queerfeminist experimental film before reviewing the theorisation of queer historicity, trauma, and the body. I then complete a three-part analysis of each phase of Nitrate Kisses, examining how traumatic memory is inscribed upon and through the bodies having sex and how accompanying pain is re-worked by the physical, sexual body, giving way to new forms of queer desire and pleasure and invoking a queer-feminist archival practice. Lastly, I open my analysis up more broadly to consider how erotic physical touch and the body's materiality engender differing forms of experiential, embodied archival knowledge.

The Influence of Queer-feminist Experimental Film
Hammer's oeuvre stems from a lineage of feminist experimental cinema ushered in by the sexual revolution in the early 1960s, and includes films produced by Yvonne Rainer and Chantal Akerman, to name only a couple of notable directors. Linda Williams aptly defines feminist and lesbian films produced during this porno-chic era as "hard-core art." 5 Williams' analysis of these films reveals their slippery positioning between pornographic cinema and avant-garde artistic film. Representations of the erotic female body thus dominated feminist experimental film, much to the chagrin of the second-wave feminist anti-pornography movement, vigilantly spurred on by lesbian feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon. 6 But for Hammer and her sex-positive corollaries, the explicit female body was clay, "palpable, malleable…the raw material" of their films. 7 As Ara Osterweil argues, experimental cinema constructed flesh as "an endlessly variable substance that could come unbound…through shattering encounters with desire, sex, pain, birth and death". 8 Graphic sexual depictions of the female body were the "primary artistic tool[s]" of feminist auteurs. 9 Their bodies were political weapons, "battleground[s]" where, as Waugh explains, queer bodies "squeez[ed] every drop of pleasure and pain" from structures of censorship and control. 10  Theorizing Queer Historicity, Trauma, and the Body "For groups constituted by historical injury," argues Heather Love, "the challenge is to engage with the past without being destroyed by it." 11 For Love, looking backwards into the past is necessary to guarantee the future survival of queer women. Queer history, she asserts, centres around a "politics of the past"the shared, embodied myths and feelings that Love argues are constructed via the long-term effects of past traumas and homophobia: suffering, escapism, regret, shame, melancholia, and failure. 12 The lesbian in history, Love argues, is always turning back to the past, nostalgic, mired in unresolved loss, grief, and mourning and obsessed with "wounded attachments." 13 Similarly, Ann Cvetkovich understands the perceived queer attachment to trauma as an "archive of feelings," driven by an urgent compulsion to "never forget" the pain and loss of the past. 14 But unlike Love and Cvetkovich, Freeman approaches queer historicity not through a focus on loss, injury, separation, displacements or "negative and negating forms of bodily experience" (what she terms as "queer melancholia theory"), but rather a focus on queer pleasure as "encountering, witnessing, and transforming history." 15 Contrasting Love and Cvetkovich's preoccupation with trauma, Freeman's erotohistoriography is: …distinct from the desire for a fully present past, a restoration of bygone times. Erotohistoriography does not write the lost object into the present so much as encounter it already in the present, by treating the present itself as hybrid. And it uses the body as a tool to erect, figure, or perform that encounter. 16 For Freeman, the body may pleasure "itself with the past," figuring a much different relationship between history and the queer body than imagined by Love or Cvetkovich. 17 In this relationship, history pleasures the body rather than troubling it. While Hammer seizes Love's challenge for queers to engage the past without suffering bodily or psychic destruction, she does so following Freeman's edicts. I intervene here to propose that Hammer's work synthesises these two contrasting theoretical schools of thought. She acknowledges the necessity for queers to turn to the past, to honour the urge to "never forget," but she is wary of becoming mired in loss and pain. In Nitrate Kisses, Hammer overlays the present with the pastsuffusing her bodies with pastness, with the trauma of her performers' queer ancestorsbut the act of sex, the eroticism of their bodies, works the pain, the pastness, the loss and trauma.

What Flesh (and Sex) Become
I turn here to Phase I of Nitrate Kisses, which explores how lesbian existence is largely rendered invisible throughout history. Phase I pinpoints certain, sharp moments of grief: an unnamed, unseen narrator tells the story of American author Willa Cather, whose memorial scholars visit from around the world while routinely failing to mention her lesbianism in their research. Another anonymous speaker discloses the burden of invisibility, who describes the closeted lifestyle of Cather and her partner: "they developed an attitude of extreme discretion, and before her death they burned all of [their] letters." Scenes of abandoned homes and empty fields play slowly, then begin to speed up frenetically. Another anonymous speaker cuts in: "lesbians disappear first of all because we are women, women disappear," she says. "They disappear because they are deviant, because it's still shameful." These statements, and the weight of the pain expressed in them, bleed over and through the bodies of two women embracing on a bed. The viewer watches an intimate, slow sex scene unfold. Other painful narratives are confessed as the physical intimacy between the two women progresses: stories of violent raids on lesbian pubs by gangs of policemen, of the difficulty of coming into lesbian consciousness, and descriptions of lesbian women losing gay male friends during the AIDS crisis. While we are not privy to the faces or even names of the speakers, including the blurred-out, pixelated faces of women dancing together at lesbian socials that play intermittently, we are given lingering, intense shots of a woman's face contorted in pleasure as she receives cunnilingus. The pain and grief of the speakers, in this sense, is transposed onto and through the woman receiving pleasureindeed it becomes her pleasure. forcing changes within subjects rather than belonging to them as static [and] innate." 18 Davis, theorising a Deleuzian model of queer cinema, argues that desire and pleasure do not "settle into any one arrangement but concern flows and frictions across and within them all." 19  "excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces," and the most marked delineation of Section II of the Code, the fourth component, which states: "sex perversion or any inference of it is forbidden." The Code led to the production of films that centred around queer death as the pinnacle tension -Rebecca (1940) is a strong example, in which a queerly coded protagonist, Mrs.
Danvers, meets an untimely death at the film's conclusion. 21 We might read this as a suggestion that queerness could not acceptably be presented as a liveable experienceit had to be put to death, so to speak. Ultimately, the Code reflected the powerful arm of the Catholic church during the 1930s. 22 The Code attempted to reach into the bedrooms of Americans by officially controlling and censoring on-screen sex.
In contrast to Phase I, the prohibition of queer existence is physically imprinted upon and  In this section of the film, shots of mass graves, the narrative of a woman speaking about recognising a fellow lesbian while held in Ravensbrück, rows of empty chairs, Waldo's cryptic lyrics and the ever-present ruins are read into the pain harnessed and deployed as power and pleasure in the BDSM sexual practices between the leather dykes. Thus, the "wounds" or injuries that the women inflict upon each other may best be understood as a processpart of the process of attempting to transform historical pain and trauma through sex. To wound in this case might be considered something sacred, rather than horrific, a transformative ritual of sorts. 31 Thus, through the practices of BDSM, the two leather dykes "mobilize erotic pleasure in… events normally experienced as tragic, violent and traumatic." 32 This ability to wield pain effectively leads to a "multiplication of potentialities of the female body" in its capacity to experience and express pleasure and desire. 33 Instead of disconnecting or distancing themselves from the past, the queer bodies in Phase

III of Nitrate Kisses refuse psychic destruction and instead caress it knowingly. Hélène
Cixous remarks on the fear of recalling painful memories, stating, "we are always afraid of seeing ourselves suffer. It is like when we have an open wound: We are terribly afraid of looking at it…and at the same time we are perhaps the only one person capable of looking at it." 34 Perhaps the only way to bear witness to such traumatic historical truth without succumbing to itperhaps the most strategic way to examine the woundis to mediate pain with pleasure, to make from pain, or make pain itself, something beautiful and sublime. We may be able to watch trauma unfold on and through the performers' bodies without wounding ourselves so deeply in the process. And we may be more aptly primed to receive the images and statements from voice-over interviews that allow us to apprehend a much broader, encompassing scope of pain.

Archival Materiality and Physical Touch
In each of the three phases of Nitrate Kisses a singular hand guides the viewer from scene to scene, calling attention to particular, fine details: a hand slowly twisting the knob on a dilapidated door to admit the viewer into the darkness of an abandoned house; a hand tracing a woman's silhouette on a photograph; a hand feeling the grooved words engraved on a tombstone; a wet hand fucking; a hand pointing to a 1909 bill established in Germany that officially criminalised lesbianism. 35 This is a spectral hand, upon first appearance seemingly disembodied and free-floating, associated with no particular voice or entity in the film, and it seems to extend outwards from the viewer's own body, positioning the viewer as holding the camera, entering into ruins, remembering, or having sex.  The hand is possessed by the materiality of the archival objects it encountersthe physical sensations produced by touching and interacting with these objects. To look is not enough.
The hand, the archivist's body, must get closer. As Alexandra Juhasz explains, feminist film demonstrates a need for the past, for history, to be "alive, instructive, interactive." 36 We might conceive of the involved hand as symbolically refuting the traditional objective relationship normally constructed between documentary subjects and filmmakers. We might also think of Hammer's involved hand as contesting the classic "separation between artist and art object." 37 Hammer's embodied participation in the film means that her use of the camera also actively works against the "filmmaker-as-fly-on-the-wall-theory" often deployed in documentary film. 38 Instead, as Osterweil explains, Hammer approaches her subjects with great intimacy, merging "emotional transparency with corporeal closeness." 39 As Hammer wonders, "the problem for me is how to take the camera to bed without objectifying the erotic experience, how to make the camera a sexual additive." 40  It is physical touchthe touch of a finger on a photograph, for examplethat becomes a  54 Perhaps the title of the film, then, gestures to the fleeting, queer "kisses" highly unstable in and of themselves, true kisses of nitratemade across time, made between the archivist and the deceased, between historical bodies and the ever probing Sapphic Finger.

Conclusion: "it is necessary to be touched"
Nitrate Kisses facilitates a "polymorphous desire to touch and open up." 55 That is, physical touch in the film becomes conflated with other bodily senses, including vision and sight.
Hammer explains: When I had my experience coming out in 1970, I touched a woman's body for the first time when we made love. All the corpuscles on my skin were highly charged by touching a body similar to my own. I think that my sense of sight is connected to my sense of touch. 56 I think here of the Code scrolled over the intertwined, writhing bodies of the gay men or the deep, throaty voiced refrain of Claire Waldo's "I tell you we must die" echoing out and over the leather dykes as they strike each other. Like Hammer's polymorphous, archival touch, Williams explains that sex no longer "takes place at a single moment in a single event," rather it may unfold across different temporalities and bodies. 57 The different forms of pleasure, desire, and sex that ripple through Nitrate Kisses elucidate the contrasting modes or practices of survival adopted by queer people in the face of death or erasure.
Touch, though, is dangerous, or perhaps, what prompts touch is dangerous. The sex scenes in Hammer's film, toeing the line of pornographic cinema, are driven by tension, a fear even, that "we may be ineluctably drawn to touch [the] images, to touch ourselves, or to touch others." 58 But as Hammer asserts conclusively, "it is necessary to be touched." 59 Physical touch and sex in Nitrate Kisses does not undo the past loss of queer life. Yet, sex, eroticism and physical touch, framed in Nitrate Kisses through the use of archival materials, are able to grow a cross-temporal queer figure capable of surviving into the future. It is through Hammer's subversive archival practices that the bodies in Nitrate Kissesthe elderly lesbian couple, the gay male couple, and the leather dykesstand as incarnations of this figure of queer futurity, something or someone that secures queer survival by combatting loss, trauma, and pain with pleasure.