Archival Research Expanded Bodily Archives and Embodied Fabulation

This chapter expands the methods of traditional archival research, from the textual and iconographic evidence that is its basis to include what Skwirblies calls ‘embodied fabulation’. As a concept, embodied fabulation does two things: one, it helps to focus archival research more strongly on embodied practices in the archive, and two, it fosters a critical reflection on the archive which includes understanding the researcher-subjects in their own embodiment. In that way, embodied fabulation helps to advance a series of speculative arguments about what is not always present in the archive, what has been silenced and marginalised in the logic of archival documentability as well as arguments about how these gaps could occur in the first place. Embodied fabulation not only helps us identify and signal where gaps exist in the archive, it also allows us to imagine embodied and performative knowledge—as archival knowledge—into these gaps.