On Historical Methods, or Trying Not to Lose So Much

I had planned to write a different kind of introduction to this special issue on feminism’s contemporary historical methods and metahistorical concerns. That one—imagined, drafted, never completed—would not have started with the word “I.” I hope that this preliminary act of self-centering will be forgiven by readers and, above all, by the authors in this issue, each of whom worked, wrote, and revised so thoughtfully despite institutional precarity, threats of redundancy, extraordinary personal and professional losses, and ongoing waves of political instability and state violence: witnessed, experienced, and protested.My undergraduate students often ask me if they can use the word “I.” Many of them are trained to avoid it. It’s a rule that they have dutifully followed for years, even if they are not quite sure what the prohibition means or why it matters. I like the moment when the question arrives, asked almost always at the earliest opportunity: first essay, first film course, first year of college. Does the rule actually stand? Can they break it? Asking my permission to break the rules is not quite breaking the rules but the start of something interesting, nonetheless. I tell them, yes, of course, you can use whatever words you like. The writing is yours, after all.I also tell them to think about when and why they might use the first person, what the voice suggests to them, why they want these particular words so much. The “we” can be coercive, as Jonathan Sterne has argued so well.1 It suggests a consensus where, maybe, there is none. It can force your readers into a community that they may not want to join (or indeed cannot join), one that ignores, excludes, or harms them. The “we” claims to speak for others, gathers up a group of people whom you may not know at all.Then again, the “I” can be a lonely, vulnerable, embarrassing kind of voice. The “I” can mistakenly express that the writing is only yours when, in fact, scholarship is a historical and fundamentally collective practice. It can be a mistake to think yourself so singular: an “I” forging a solitary path, staking its claim in some wilderness. Others are likely right there with you, having arrived well in advance or been there all along, for better or for worse.But the “I” can work in other ways. It can be a sign of intellectual humility, sincerity, and presence: there you are, a person, alive and writing, just trying (essay-ing) to make sense of things as they come undone. Writing is about making your own choices, I tell my students. You can use whatever words you like.The “I” also stands in solidarity with long-standing feminist critiques of historical writing and its most common clichés: the third-person performance of objectivity, authority, and distance; tidy lines of cause-and-effect; the too-simple narrative structures of this-and-then-that; the promise of continuous generational progress and change. The “I” draws attention to the contingent and precarious time of writing itself, to the temporally bound and embodied conditions that constitute every act of historical analysis and understanding. In her critique of feminism’s own historical mythologies, Clare Hemmings puts the disjunctive temporality of historical writing this way: “all history takes place in the present.”2 In her writing about “the time of slavery,” Saidiya Hartman argues that our obligations to remember and mourn the dead equally require an adjustment in how one understands the time and place of those deaths: “The ‘time of slavery’ negates the common-sense intuition of time as continuity or progression, then and now coexist; we are coeval with the dead.”3 For Elizabeth Freeman, the queer “drag” of historical time names at once the pull of the past on every present—the historical undertow that draws time back and counteracts its forward propulsion, its waves of progress—but also the disjunctive and co-temporal performance of identity.4Time is always out of joint in historical writing, and so, too, is every historian. In her book, Pink-Slipped, Jane Gaines returns to the dilemmas of historical time and puts pressure on the present: What and when is it? Who exists there? Gaines reminds us that the present is as slippery and elusive as the past.5 The deictic or demonstrative structure of “I”—like any other indexical, for example, words like here, now, you, me, us—depends on spatiotemporal coordinates that are fundamentally impermanent. The “I” comes and goes. It must always be revisited and recursively defined.Here, now, I find it difficult to keep track of time. I get my years mixed up. I have lost long stretches of a life that, others assure me, I have in fact lived. I was there. They took photos. I understand that I am living in a time of erasure. So I have been told. But my body and mind seem to play a part in all of the forgetting. In March 2020, I left my office and went home. At some point in 2022, I returned. In between, I taught film theory and second grade and dug a hole in my backyard so that my kids could go swimming.In the spring of 2023, I sketched the methodological questions that, I thought, would motivate this issue. Between those moments and this one, another two years have passed. Not much time, really. But when the issue finally appears in the world, its introduction will need updating. I will be different, sure, but more websites and words and students will have disappeared by then. I try to keep lists of the losses to protect against my own forgetting:On January 20, 2025, Executive Order 14168 rescinded federal protections from trans and nonbinary people in the United States.6On February 1, 2025, thousands of US government websites disappeared, including those dedicated to reproductive health care.7Universities in the United Kingdom expect to cut 10,000 jobs before the end of the year.8At least 197 words and phrases have been purged from US federal agencies. A partial alphabet of prohibited terms: Accessible, Black, Climate Crisis, Disparity, Ethnicity, Feminism, Gender, Historically, Immigrants, [J], Key People, LGBTQ, Marginalized, Native American, Oppression, Prejudice, Queer, Racism, Segregation, Transgender, Underrepresented, Victim, Women, [X, Y, Z].9The United Nations reports that more than 80 percent of schools and 60 percent of all educational facilities in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. The report describes the effort as scholasticide, or the “systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure.”10Between February and April 2025, federal funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) was suspended or terminated.11At the end of March 2025, colleagues began receiving NEH grant termination letters. Recipients had to go searching for them in spam folders. Those letters deserve their own essay.12In the United States, students were arrested by immigration officers wearing masks, transported across state lines, and indefinitely detained. More than 1,500 student visas have been revoked.13On March 25, 2025, the Gaza health ministry published a document listing the names of 50,021 Palestinian people who have been killed since the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023. Two years is not much time. There are 15,613 names of dead children. The number will be larger, whenever you happen to be reading.14During the first years of what would become a long, strange, ongoing pandemic, a new constellation of historical thinking began taking shape, one oriented in large part around speculative methods, but also the concepts of hauntology and potentiality, bad objects and archives, the aesthetic possibilities of historical practice and the uses of form, and, in particular, Black, queer, and trans feminisms. My own research on the challenges that early ethnographic cinema poses to the recuperative impulses of film history arrived nearly in tandem with a truly thrilling body of scholarship, both within and beyond film and media studies, including methodological thinking and rethinking from Jennifer DeClue, Priya Jaikumar, Jennifer Nash, Samantha Pinto, Jed Samer, Eliza Steinbock, and Jasmine Nadua Trice.15 In 2022, Feminist Media Histories published a two-volume issue, edited by Allyson Nadia Field, dedicated to speculative historical models.16 Field traces the genealogy of speculation from Giuliana Bruno’s ruined map to Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulations.17 The speculative method, in Field’s view, follows the “sublimated what if? of our imaginations to their potential (in)conclusions.”18 In 2023, another exceptional volume arrived: Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film, edited by Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon, who describe the history of missing, incomplete, and unfinished films as one not easily told, with seemingly infinite possible beginnings (and dead ends).19 It moves along multiple, simultaneous pathways through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and into a time yet-to-come. Indeed, for them, the speculative method turns not only to the past—asking “what if?” or “what could have been?”—but toward the future: “what will have happened”?20Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is a foundational text for Field, Beeston and Solomon, and so many contemporary scholars of history, including several contributors here. The book begins with a brief “note on method,” which I took as structural inspiration for this issue.21 Wayward Lives is a work of counterhistory, extracted from archival materials—debt records, prison case files, police reports, trial documents—that criminalized the women whose stories Hartman writes. Hartman’s note offers an interregnum between title and text, a crucial paratext that no doubt invites some readers to take their leave.22 There, she explains that the book draws on techniques of “close narration,” a practice of historical imagining that binds author and subjects together. The note acknowledges historiographic norms and disavows them. The women are there and not there, real but also imagined. Rather than trying to keep her distance, Hartman wants to live inside their dreams.As a form of writing, the methodological note invites experimentation and metacritical writing. It allows for reflection on the ways and whys we do things, separated from the task of our actually doing them. The note admits our commitments and demands that we defend them in advance. It is a kind of writing that reminds me of the stumbling and multiple starts to Archive Fever, the hesitancy to begin gathering up an archive and foreclosing the ones that could have been.23 The term itself is also wonderfully capacious and contradictory. It is etymologically tied (in English) to both Latin and French (nota, note), recalling acts of observation, writing, and listening. The note is a single character or letter and the words or sounds that they combine to form. It is meaning, medium, and material: the messages one writes, sees, hears, expresses, the sign-system one uses to do so, and its physical substrate. The note is a historical document, scribbled (annotated) in the margins, tucked into the pages of a book, lost and found and unfolded with nimble fingertips, or slipped into the end of whatever this is. It marks the most important (note-worthy) things, but it also defies disciplinary norms and the formalities of writing. The note is intimate, written on a whim, or on the run. It comes from somewhere, someone, at a particular point in time. An imperative, maybe a warning.The etymology of the word “method” is no less noteworthy. Its history is medicinal. Before it becomes a catch-all term for a certain way of doing things (ordering objects, writing histories, imprisoning human subjects), “method” is a treatment to cure disease.24 This usage is obsolete (worn out, dilapidated, fallen into disregard).In the same spring that I started to think about notes and methods, Christina Sharpe published Ordinary Notes, an expansive and profound collection of textual fragments, photographs, letters, prayers, poems, and sustained reflection on white supremacy and the intrinsic failures of nearly every effort to memorialize atrocity. Note 23: Spectacle Is Not Repair.25 Sharpe describes her childhood in Wayne, Pennsylvania—“a town that used and hated and feared its Black population”—and how her mother created a world of Black books, handmade ornaments, colored yarns, and cursive lettering.26 Sharpe asks, “What is beauty made of?” and answers, “Attentiveness whenever possible to a kind of aesthetic that escaped violence whenever possible—even if it is only the perfect arrangement of pins.”27 Note 51: Beauty Is a Method. Sharpe also notes the coercion of collective pronouns, the presumption of shared histories and experiences: “The architectures of violence fracture we; affect does not reach us in the same way.”28 A single, unifying we, us, our does not exist.In calling for methodological notes, I was interested not only in the speculative methods that Hartman’s work had encouraged but also other methodological shifts underway across the whole of media studies. I asked contributors to consider: What kind of note would they write to describe or defend their methods? What difference do distinct media (or technologies) make to the histories we write and the archives we encounter? What are the challenges of our institutional environments, media infrastructures, and cultural or political are scholars writing, and media histories of questions about feminist historical practice now a of What was feminist media What has it what have contemporary media scholars and from this long intellectual course, metahistorical thinking and methodological have been in feminist media scholarship and practice for can equally the of queer, and most across the pages of this historiographic work and but it also how the of historical histories get the of historical writing, that the that use to and In feminist writing, the archive is a of state yes, but it is also the body that one the that one the that into and physical with the world and its Feminist media the of by what we know about and who would have been but they also the to and as well as the and possibilities of Feminist archives are and found have also long against any what if that take the present as an more more more of from which to understand the for example, What if a historical had been What could they have or made or What would their have of speculation on the same historical and lines of continuity that feminist methods What kind of past will this present What will have been and Who would have if things had been that I have not been against of continuity and Feminist and historical I The kind of imagining and making and writing that feminist media do so often demands this kind of critical as one against threats of and out of and and and in the of archives and difficult institutional making sense there would be But I also if the of contemporary feminist methods might to that of that For names a to about a better on the just out of us from the conditions of the to is not or in view, but a that returns us to the of the that to the of the that others are living right now and the of every historical that takes place in this It is the historical they that is by of historical which on as a to the past and on a form of must not from some of the historical This historical is its own kind of a history written from by no one in have been The and early spring are now of physical the names of my and the people I I know that I am not and has a life of about I am also how to do things the my the protect my describes the archive as a or a writes, “The archive has always been a and like every a of the any that I know is to need these another time, in my own I the of that from early and in The of historical and in my view, historiographic that might our of film as and fundamentally to and make The that I am living so many of us are in different be to from our archives, and But I am more to the of at I understand that one can in the practice of any hope of all just trying not to so issue methodological notes from an extraordinary community of and media and I am to have been to think them for so many were encouraged to with form and to play with the norms of writing. The notes across performance and other and a of media archives and the and of from which media histories as well as the of metahistorical and methodological thinking that have media scholarship for issue begins with that the and of the that the and often conditions that and history together. 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For and of and physical and a form of takes as a term for a feminist practice. not only critiques of and but also offers a critical form of historical and readers to just what it might or what might have been different if the of her (and indeed her and had our present and its the of ways of it with the of In the work of and preliminary to the question with which she begins and, that do not need to be or They are issue with a of notes on methodological or the of case studies. 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