The Queer Archive as Promiscuous Ethics of Care

Abstract

During their play Burgerz (2018) – performed around the time of the public consultation for the reform of the Gender Recognition Act – trans artist and activist Travis Alabanza draws on and re-activates a genealogy of transcestor kinship structures (Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans: A new history of gender, London: Basic Books, 2022) constituted by mostly non-Western gender non-conforming identities such as the Hijra, the Kathoey, Two Spirit, Quariwarmi and the Femminiello. With this, Alabanza contributes towards their overarching project of archiving trans lives, while highlighting the need to draw on non-Western epistemologies of gender identity to counter contemporary forms of transphobia. Before the opening of Burgerz, Alabanza held Tranz Talkz, a series of conversations with trans and gender non-conforming people throughout different theatre venues in the UK. Drawing on the central element of their show – the burger – these talks were held around tables where participants ate burgers and chips, and recorded with the aim of creating a sound archive that preserves the implications of being a gender non-conforming person in contemporary Britain. Looking at Burgerz and the recorded material from Tranz Talkz, this article argues that Alabanza’s entangled art project creates a queer archive that, attending to Ann Cvetkovitch’s words, ‘preserve[s] and produce[s] not just knowledge but feeling’ (An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, sexuality and lesbian public cultures, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003). The approach to Alabanza’s project through Cvetkovitch’s lens reveals how the trans archive generates a practice of undoing epistemic violence, in the sense of countering transphobia, and constitutes, borrowing The Care Collective’s terminology, a ‘promiscuous ethics of care’ (Andreas Chatzidakis et al., The Care Manifesto: The politics of interdependence, London: Verso Books, 2020) understood as activating alternative forms of caring kinship structures beyond the nuclear family.