The fabric of our memories: Leather,kinship,and queer material history

Abstract

This article examines how the practices of self-preservation and other-directed care within Baltimore’s gay leather community are entangled with the material fabric of leather. I argue that leather forms a mnemonic technology that mediates between intimate experience and collective memory, thereby enabling leathermen to develop affective attachments to both the past and the future of their shared form of life. Ultimately, my aim is to attend to the relation between memory and materiality, asking how the material qualities of leather, as treated animal skin, evoke, store, and shape memories and, vice versa, how such memories imbue leather items with emotional, cultural, and political values.

Keywords

Baltimore care endurance gay leather intimacy materiality

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