Archives of loss: bodies, narratives, and dead feminist peace organizations

This paper examines the archival remnants of defunct Israeli feminist peace organizations, exploring how social movements sustain memory amid erasure and political violence. Based on a collaborative feminist ethnography (2019–2021) involving archival collections and interviews with Jewish and Palestinian feminist peace activists, the study traces six defunct organizations that were active between 1987 and 2018. We argue that the fate of feminist peace organizations and their archives is mutually entangled: as organizations disintegrate, activists often become both archivists and embodied archives of their movements’ political histories, carrying affective memory when formal records vanish. Drawing on the concept of the anarchive, the paper shows how affects, gestures, and bodily experiences serve as repositories of feminist peace activism that persist through organizational collapse. The process of tracing these materials has revealed archiving as an embodied practice central to understanding the afterlives of social movements.