ABSTRACT

Memory is life. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. History is perpetually suspicious of memory. Like Cindy Sherman with her precariously attached props, none was a stranger to performance or masquerade; none underestimated her uncanny position 'between memory and history.' The legally and genitally male Calpernia Addams, a preoperative transsexual, is the activist-widow of private first class Barry Winchell, who was killed for being gay even though some, including the man who now acts as his widow, say he was not. One thing is clear: whether trans-gendered or transgressing, cross-cultural or cross-dressing, early modern or postmodern, the widow – monumentalized and politicized – occupies a very precarious site 'between memory and history.'.