 She is the author of the award-winning The Gift of Freedom and co-editor of Alien Encounters, Popular Culture in Asian America. Please welcome Mimi. So I'm an academic whose scholarship is about war and humanitarianism and liberal empire. And then I'm also a writer whose zines are archived and analyzed by scholars who are technically my colleagues. So it's weird. It's a weird situation and for the most part I've tended to sort of look away. Like I don't want to read what they write about me or anything like that. But in the last few years I've been asked to reflect on my zines, on other people's zines, on zine archives, on riot girl histories, on punk studies and so on and so forth. So I figured I needed to theorize my own reluctance to turn my zines into my scholarship and my reluctance to otherwise engage this field of punk studies. So the first step I took became the chapbook punk, which was published last year by Sarah McCary on guillotine press, which is a conversation between myself and former Maximum Rock and Roll coordinator and Columbia graduate student Golanar Nickpour about our punk doors, what Zinster Nicky Gomez calls that sort of decisive moment or encounter during which a person can either turn away or walk through that door. About punk politics, whether or not we can assume that punk has a politics. And about punk studies in which punk becomes an object of study and a description for some imagined particular method of inquiry. So the second step I took to sort of think about why people kept asking me to talk about my own zines and then sort of theorizing my reluctance is this essay that I'm going to read from today, which I wrote for an academic journal called Radical History Review for a special issue called Queer Archives. So I'm just going to read a little bit of the introduction and then a little bit of the conclusion. You know, and I cut out parts of it are pretty theoretical, but hopefully you'll be able to understand what I'm talking about because it's basically an argument against this sort of institutionalization and instrumentalizing of what I call minor objects which include things like punk objects, queer objects, and so on and so forth in academic institutionalized studies and stuff. So this is the beginning. How does one go about creating an archive of minor threats? And to what uses might an archive be put? In a column published in 2009 for Punk Magazine Maximum Rock and Roll musician and writer Osa Atoh wondered at the seeming disappearance of black and brown punks from only a few years before her time. She writes of revisiting her collection to read again 10, 15-year-old zines including Race Riot, How to Stage a Coup, Slander, Quantify, and Mala, and how these helped her and other black and brown punks who came later establish a genealogy and a touchstone. And this is a quote from that column. What all these early POC punk zines did for me in touch with other brown punk kids? I remember meeting this queer Asian girl Celeste at a barbecue birthday party because I saw a copy of Race Riot sticking out of her bag. Later we started a queer people of color group together making up about six brown queer kids. Osa also wonders what happens to us to the black and brown punk women who created communion where there had been none. This is another quote. What was the point of putting out zines like Race Riot and How to Stage a Coup and not to try to spawn some kind of change in the punk scene? Well, here we are, the change I hope they wish to see in the world. People of color punks, empowered by the words and deeds of those who came before us, building community with each other and ready to fuck shit up. So, what emerges for me from Osa's sort of brown study is how these objects describe a cluster of unpredictable encounters with others across time. When I brought together the imperfect partial histories that made up Race Riot, so the initial call for contributions circulated in 1994 and 1995, I could not then have anticipated how a copy of a copy of a copy belonging to a sister of an older brother's best friend might find its way into the hands of a young punk 10 or 20 years later, as it does, and create connection through the chance encounter. For Osa and Celeste, others I have met since and more I do not know yet. To answer Osa's question in part, some of us are still punk, others put punk behind them, while our objects continue to corroborate our presence as provocation even now. So it might be that an archive of minor threats is an incitement to loosen or grasp more tightly a promise between past and future. But I have concerns too about what happens to us in our threats. Those minor objects that once circulated between us are now amassing in library collections and institutional archives, shared and sometimes scanned, reformatted and uploaded on public and semi-public platforms, while academic studies and popular press anthologies republish images and passages alongside close readings and remembrances. And so the conditions for encountering our objects are radically changed years later. Once my own scenes began to figure into historical and archival discourses about punk cultures, especially as radically minor objects that stood in for critical reckoning with the politics of race and gender, I wondered what else has changed in the increasingly institutional encounter and in this story about a history of minor and in the construction of the story of a history of minor threats. So this essay is a queer love song to radically minor objects that render the past in the present as a wish or wanting for something more and also a caution about the production of knowledge about those objects into what Roderick Ferguson calls the reorder of things. While I focus on punk studies in the field of cultural politics, I follow cues from transnational and post-colonial feminist studies and queer of color critique to take up questions about minor objects as entry points for disruption and discipline, especially where power is sphere of control and knowledge is realm of interference together aimed to try to capture that minor object. Here the concept of minor object describes those marginal forms, persons, and worlds that are mobilized to designate moments of crisis. By way of a minor object, exclusion and normativity might be laid bare and the contingent quality of knowledge or other claims fold under scrutiny. Punk is one such minor object saved my life as the saying goes because it gave me words and gestures that once incoate feelings about the cluster of promises that comprise what Lauren Berlant calls a cruel optimism. The state and capital are on your side. The ring on your finger is a sign of love and protection, for instance. The good life, fuck that. But while a minor object might describe the limits of a structure or practice and be met with clear violence, a minor object might also be recruited to manage or overcome those limits and they're laying bare, especially through acts such as recognition, inclusion, and establishing normative principles without necessarily being itself engaged directly. So an example would be the way that people talk about the same-sex marriage, right? And the idea that recognition and inclusion are the danger of recognition and inclusion. So called upon to provide presence and course correction towards a more quote-unquote complete picture, even as a minor object might be brought to bear upon the fractures of empire or the so-called good life, this integration or partial recognition or presence of some minor objects into major histories can be made to resolve the same. So what happens to the brats and the new bloods, the poison girls, the androids of Mu, persons unknown or younger lovers when we are called upon to fill a void, correct a partial claim, or set straight a story? How do the politics surrounding institutional discourses of a minor threat, especially at the crash with race or gender, displace or diffuse that threat through its integration into a politics, a history, or an archive? How might the specific difference of the minor object be enlisted to enhance a normative principle and already known story? Such instrumental gestures toward minor objects are the source of inclusion's coercive diminishing effects on the imagination as well as practice. Against fantasies of restoration, historical coherence or continuity, against plentitude or a conceivable whole, against expertise and other organs for legitimacy, I want to argue that our minor objects need not cohere or collude with preconceived principles or political projects in order for us to be with them and let them manifest what they will, including those dense, bright, marvelous and impossible meetings with one another. So there's a bunch of stuff in the middle where I talk about Osa and her zine shotgun seamstress, which is a really amazing great zine about black punks, talks about a black punk zine that never happened and I talk about, like, what does it mean to imagine a black punk zine that never happened and I talk about the sort of increasing institutionalization of riot girl archives, zines, and how people want to bring me into them as the person who talks about race and riot girl and how uncomfortable and weird I think that is. And then, so there's a whole thing in the middle. But I want to read just the conclusion then which I've also kind of edited down. So I want to make an argument, in the essay I'm making an argument against people finding me accessible or finding our minor objects accessible, sort of against assimilation and accessibility. So that's where the middle was leading to. So let us then consider seriously the aversion to becoming intelligible or otherwise accessible. I take my cue from a scene from Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains from 1982, a film directed by Lou Adler. During what appears to be a disastrous first gig with her all-girl punk band at the local bar, the red and black eyed teenage malcontent Corinne Burns is taunted by a woman in the audience who dismisses her performance as the idle noise of adolescent attitude as if this was nothing at all. Corinne turns her sarcasm upon her hecklers, playing misogynist fantasies of romantic intimacy, sneering, sucker. Corinne then tosses her trench coat to the side of the stage as the audience gasps. She appears as though vulnerable in black underwear, fishnet stockings and sheer red blouse, but she defiantly refuses intelligibility and accessibility. Grabbing the microphone she snarls, I'm perfect but nobody in this shithole gets me because I don't put out. What is sometimes dismissed, again, as adolescent intractability or punk secrecy, might bear out as a more dense denial. As Sarah Ahmed, Sai Ngai, Evelyn Hammonds, among others observe so well, ugly or backward feelings that appear to suspend action or refuse to say might yet yield a diagnostics of power under the shadow of looming capture. Then there's a cut out of a bunch of stuff. With what then does this leave us? So I've tried to say that some things about minor objects, that they might be non-normative and even threatening without having a unified or prescriptive politics, that their integration into institutional forms of history and archive can describe a form of capture, and that we do not have to discipline objects or signs to perceive what is being lost in conventional fantasies of progress or perfect knowledge. Punk long ago disappointed my teenage hopes for an obviously revolutionary politic being both a placeholder for institutionally improper craving but also immersed in the errors of all manner of dumbfuckery. But in doing so, I learned something else. Not to believe in those forms of political life, such as consensus, clarity, or closeness, as obligatory measures or commands for fashioning politics or life otherwise. What might be perceived as an adolescent intractability or punk purity might actually bleed into a critique about usable instrumentalist knowledge about minor objects unsettling the question of how to be political without a necessary orientation towards expertise, efficiency, or predictable ends? How then do we make disturbance present and perceptible without requiring clarity or coherence or transformation or consensus as measures for calculation and appraisal? Under what circumstances might our queer attachment or absences or deliberate obscurities or the 30 passage into an archive be marshaled within an order of a continuous history? That's a reference to something I talked about in the middle. Through a complicity between critical articulation and political utility. And that was about how people want to say that punk is necessarily resistant, which anyone who's been in punk knows that's not. What circumstances could sabotage them? Can we yet be destroyers of the status quo? What would it mean for a politics of knowledge and as yet obscure possibility to say to each other from one minor threat to another, you are perfect, don't let anyone in this shithole get you, you don't have to put out. That's it.