Ephemera Beyond Evidence: <em>Sister</em> (2019) and the “Self-destructive” Potential of Digital Queer Storytelling

Although scholarship on queer narrative and new media has critically raised concerns over the instability of digital queer storytelling, I close-read Sister (2019) as a digital queer storytelling form that invites fragility and imperfection as part of its performance and care in the cyberspace of YouTube. Engaging with José Muñoz’s queer ephemera as evidence, I argue that Sister’s “unstable” treatment of its source materials, its precarious housing on YouTube, and its amateurish visual and audio quality critically suggest a radical queerness of color that exists beyond evidence. I suggest the film as an analogy of a queer archive that resists a paranoid reading: Its very analog-like imperfection (that borders on erasing the same materials it tries to present) embraces self-destructivity and ephemerality that embody a trans* ontology of becoming. By integrating documentary, narrative, and archival forms with opacity as central to its storytelling, the film exemplifies a reparative turn that goes beyond the expectations of pain, permanence, and clarity in a Vietnamese trans* story. I argue that the film’s digital circulation amplifies ephemera beyond evidence by embracing disjuncture across platforms, resonating with Eliza Steinbock’s “shimmering images” of trans* cinema. Overall, my reading challenges seeing Sister as an autonomous film that exists in a vacuum: Its digital travel across (plat)forms and its formal opacity craft a subversive strategy of community building based on collaboration and affect across digital/physical space and time.