Queer Archive Research Articles

Collaborating, collecting and representing: queer independent archives and their connections with GLAM institutions in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Introduction. Queer independent archives play a significant role in their communities, preserving and providing access to narratives that might otherwise be lost. Queer archives are assumed to be homogenous and thus representative, although some queer communities are not visible. Collaborations with GLAM institutions and universities have become more prevalent as the importance of supporting independent archives is recognised. Nevertheless, for many queer archives and their communities retaining autonomy in such collaborations is vital. Method. These issues were explored from the perspective of New Zealand’s three queer independent archives through six semi-structured interviews conducted with representatives from each archive. Analysis. The analysis revealed a range of institutional collaborations, reflecting the needs and situation of each archive. Employing different collecting approaches to broaden community representation and record queer life experiences were priorities for the queer archives although with varying degrees of success. Conclusion. This paper highlights some of the challenges faced by queer archives regarding representation and visibility and how institutional collaborations could prove beneficial. Conversely, there may be drawbacks for queer archives, particularly during renegotiations, when power imbalances might become evident. A regular review might assist GLAMs to more gainfully support queer archives operating in an evolving queer space.

Doing LGBTQ internet histories justice: a queer web archive manifesto

Despite the web’s revolutionary impact on LGBTQ communities, the preservation and study of LGBTQ web histories have been largely overlooked by archives and scholars. This neglect has contributed to a “queer digital dark age,” perpetuating the symbolic annihilation of LGBTQ people in the historical record. Drawing on an extensive review of queer archive and library studies literature, as well as a survey of curators of queer web archives, this article argues for urgent intervention. Specific actions are needed: heritage institutions should prioritise creating queer web collections, and scholars must begin consulting existing collections. Failure to address this undermines the representation of LGBTQ experiences and hinders our understanding of online LGBTQ life. By examining extant initiatives, specifically the LGBT + web archive of the National Library of the Netherlands, this article demonstrates the potential of studying queer internet histories through web archives. Such endeavours enable diachronic research and the application of computational methods like hyperlink analyses, revealing the interconnected nature of queer online cultures. Ultimately, this article advocates a collaborative dialogue between queer archival and librarian studies, web archive studies, and LGBTQ internet studies—which must lead to pressing steps to preserve and comprehensively examine LGBTQ online heritage.

Haunting justice: queer bodies, ghosts, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

This article was named the winner of the 2022 Enloe Award. The committee commented: Using a queer hauntological approach to read queer bodies in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the seemingly innocuous language of judges, legal counsels, and witnesses, the author illuminates the ways in which queer lives are made absent in international law and in experiences of war, peace, and justice. By rendering queer lives as “ghosts,” the author shows how the “straight, binary, and cisgender subject,” be it victim or perpetrator, is maintained in international criminal justice. Going beyond critique by centering a queer archive created by queer people about their experiences of the war, the article stood out to the committee as an important contribution to international law and beyond. By rendering queer lives “intelligible and grievable and as lives that matter,” it continues Cynthia Enloe’s legacy of finding sex and gender where it has been hidden. Ultimately, the author does not call for the inclusion or assimilation of queer experiences into liberal international criminal justice discourses, which co-opt and empty radical politics. Successfully showing how “haunting” represents a radical call for “alternative worlds,” the article provides an original challenge to move beyond mere inclusion. The committee commends the author for their careful scholarship and deep theorization.

‘Starved for pleasure’: the fashion magazine as a desirous queer archive

ABSTRACT Bringing queer affect theory to bear on the history of fashion magazines, I track how in the 1990s Dutch – an independent fashion publication which became increasingly popular across Europe and the United States at the turn of the century – began to interrogate the visual ideologies of the fashion system. In a historical moment in which the sense of relief brought to the LGBTQ community by the effectiveness of antiretroviral therapy coincided with the deflation of radical energies within gay activism and the partial integration of the community into mainstream state systems, a coterie of gay fashion editors and photographers reconceived of the fashion magazine as a platform for gay erotica and collective identification, beyond a heteronormative economy of consumption. Through its photographic spreads and feature articles, Dutch disidentified with the conventional genre of the fashion magazine, typically a mediator of fantasies of glamour and upward mobility. This article argues that Dutch was a covert archive of queer feelings that, by attuning its readership to a counter-mood of hope and pleasure, initiated the formation of fashion magazine counterpublics, ultimately reshaping the fashion mediascape for years to come.

The geopolitics of queer archives: Contested Chineseness and queer Sinophone affiliations between Hong Kong and Taiwan

Hong Kong and Taiwan, two Sinophone societies peripheral to continental China, have divergent colonial pasts and distinct cultures. Yet, their fates have been increasingly intertwined since the rise of China in the global economy. We propose the geopolitics of queer archives to trace minor–minor exchanges of queer knowledge and activism that are neither officially recognized by the state nor mapped into mainstream discussions of international relations. Through a conjunctural analysis of queer scholarship in Hong Kong and Taiwan since the 1980s, we contest the notion of Chineseness in shaping the knowledge of queer sexualities and argue that a wholesale recycling of postcolonial critique on these two societies’ resistance to China risk reproducing US-centrism.

Readings in queer pleasure

This article analyzes the queer pleasures of the 2015 sf movie by the Wachowski sisters, Jupiter Ascending . We find that these pleasures operate on two intertwined levels: the movie’s campy villains and over-the-top aesthetics reflect the themes of queer temporality and reproduction on the textual level, while the straight romance of the protagonist draws on the queer archive of fan fiction. We engage with queer studies and fan studies as critical frameworks that allow us to center affective pleasures of recognizing well-established romantic tropes and character archetypes. Critical debates surrounding Jupiter Ascending point to a larger discussion concerning the space for pleasure within sf texts and sf fan communities, while the movie’s commitment to fan fiction tropes and narrative practices anticipates recent changes in media consumption and production patterns.

The Queer Archive as Promiscuous Ethics of Care

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.

What matters in the queer archive? Technologies of memory and Queering the Map

Queering the Map ( queeringthemap.com ) is a novel digital platform: a storymap, an anonymous collaborative record, an archive of queer experiences. To contribute to the platform, visitors make their own mark by clicking on an empty space on the map. As to what visitors contribute, the platform’s About section suggests, simply, ‘If it counts for you, then it counts for Queering the Map’. In this article, we probe this guiding principle. What does count in this context? What matters in the queer archive? Drawing on interviews with 14 site users and an analysis of nearly 2000 stories pinned to Australia on the map, we consider what platform practices reveal about queer collective memory-making, to illuminate the how and why of a queer archive. We see that relatability matters because of the affective, affirming and community-building seeds it can generate; situation matters because it is through participatory practices that recognition, visibility and community place- making are enacted; and, the everyday matters as the archive’s visitors collectively claim and gift their varied personal experiences. Through these themes we explore queer contributions or how site visitors are oriented towards giving something of themselves to the archive. We discuss how archival properties of the platform are key to (queer) participation, and to meaning-making – as distinct, as queer, as a valued record. Queering the Map, we argue, is significant in how space is made for queer representation, carving new contours for archival ‘evidence’ and community histories.

‘Queer Villainy’: Carmen Maria Machado’s <i>In the Dream House</i> as Testimony to Lesbian Abuse and Love

Domestic violence and abuse (DVA) are popularly believed to be the exclusive preserve of the heterosexual population. This assumption underpins the fact that policy and interventions aimed at reducing DVA often focus on remediating men’s behaviour so that they become less violent towards women. Such views exclude the fact that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) people also experience DVA. This lack of knowledge is partly due to the lack of legitimacy afforded to non-heterosexual relationships. This extends to literary-cultural representations, and there is a particular dearth of texts representing lesbian partnerships. Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, <i>In the Dream House</i> (2019), fills a gap in literary representations of lesbian relationships, as well as in representations of DVA between same-sex partners. In this article, we read the work as literary scholars, but we do not interpret it as a hermetically sealed work of art with no reference to the world. Instead, we argue that it makes an important contribution, in literary form, to the emerging scholarship on DVA amongst LGBTQ people. We explore how its literary strategies create rich connections with popular culture and give it a place in the queer archive.

Queer Archives, Performance, and Historiography in South Korea

South Korea has recently experienced a queer historical turn. Contemporary Korean queer artists have been increasingly reanimating queer pasts in order to imagine queerness as a sense of togetherness. siren eun young jung’s Yeosung Gukgeuk Project (2008–present), one of the most celebrated works of queer art in South Korea, is a queer rendition of yeosung gukgeuk, a genre of all-female Korean opera of the 1950s and 1960s.

"Kinds of Histories That Save Lives": A Q&A on Queer Archives in Kentucky and Arizona

"Kinds of Histories That Save Lives": A Q&A on Queer Archives in Kentucky and Arizona

Between Holy Church and Holy Human Rights

Abstract This article considers the experiences of Romanian men and women who expressed same-sex desire immediately following the collapse of Nicolae Ceaușescu's regime in 1989 until Romania's accession to the European Union in 2007. Drawing from the Adrian Newell Păun Queer Archives, this research puts at its forefront the voices of queer individuals to shine a light on the hardships of living as a sexual minority in the repressive environment of Romania in the 1990s. This research follows the broader framework of decolonizing Eastern European queer history by giving members of the LGBTQ+ community their rightful voices to tell the story of their plight and their perspectives in a country where they experienced widespread homophobia, transphobia, and discrimination. Through firsthand accounts, this article additionally exemplifies how queer individuals were able to survive hardship, to find their voices within their own community, and to begin experiencing and expressing themselves as a sexual minority.

Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West. By E Cram

“What might we do with violent inheritance?” (30) E Cram’s timely study centers on this question. Cram traces material, affective, and ideological “land lines” to engage places where sexual modernity intersects with other extractive structures including settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and petromodernity (6–7). Their analysis focuses on a loosely defined western region including Wyoming (where they grew up) but also encompassing Colorado, Idaho, Iowa (where they live), and Manitoba (where I live). Bringing together queer ecologies, the energy humanities, settler-colonial studies, communication studies, and geography, Violent Inheritance models innovative research methods for “embodied queer ecological criticism” (9)—including looking for “gasps” in the archive (79), resisting extractive research practices, and pushing queer studies beyond the individual or the subject and toward the (infra)structural. Cram’s introduction lays out an important, yet dizzying, array of terms: “sexual modernities, land lines, and [queer and anticolonial] regeneration” are identified as the main ones (emphasis in original; 9), alongside others (especially “innervation” and “enervation” [emphasis in original; 14–15], and “infrastructures of feeling” [22; 202]). The first chapter, which centers on the writings of Owen Wister, engages late-nineteenth-century theories of neurasthenia alongside a modern, energetic, colonial notion of subjectivity forged through friction with and dominance of western climates and environments. The second chapter considers the archival remains of Wyoming political economist and settler feminist Grace Raymond Hebard as both a eugenic violent inheritance and a queer archive that can be regenerated without being recuperated.

Patrick McDonagh. Gay and Lesbian Activism in the Republic of Ireland, 1973–93.

The Republic of Ireland has witnessed vast social reforms in the twenty-first century, including decriminalization of abortion, the extension of civil marriage to same-sex couples, and a reformation of divorce legislation. For perhaps the first time in the history of the Irish State, the country has shed its conservative Catholic image to become a leader in civil rights. Recent histories of modern Ireland have begun to document the root of activist movements that have led to such social reforms, including now Gay and Lesbian Activism in the Republic of Ireland, 1973–93 by Patrick McDonagh. Prior to this publication, historical accounts of gay and lesbian activism in Ireland preceding the decriminalization of male homosexual activity in 1993 were sadly lacking. Yet the records of individuals and organizations were readily available for public consultation. In 2007, Senator David Norris, an Irish civil rights campaigner and a central figure in the decriminalization bill, donated his personal archive to the National Library of Ireland. The following year the National LGBT Federation made the pertinent decision to donate the Irish Queer Archive (Cartlann Aerach na hÉireann), also to the National Library of Ireland. That collection of material is vast, including the records of many central LGBT organizations and the personal papers of gay rights activists in Ireland. McDonagh is perhaps the first historian to fully use these manuscript collections, and the result is a detailed and engaging account of the gay rights movement in Ireland. McDonagh has also incorporated oral interviews to great effect, including interviews taken specifically for this research as well as accessing the records of Edmund Lynch, who has been conducting interviews with Irish LGBT individuals since 2013.

“Local guys wanted”: homoerotic photography, censorship, and national belonging in apartheid South Africa – the case of Alternative Books (1981-1991)

This article explores the singular case of Alternative Books (AB), a South African publisher of homoerotic photography active in the late apartheid period. While AB's titles broadly engaged established Western aesthetic traditions of the male nude (salient in gay print cultures of the twentieth century), their erotic scenes frequently played out against national landmarks and symbols, suggesting a distinct mode of vernacular homoerotic photography. Given the widespread disenfranchisement of gay men during apartheid, this study considers the affective and political potential of such images for reconciling same-sex desire with national identity, albeit for a limited (that is, predominantly white) historical audience. First, to plot the history of social homophobia and anti-gay legislation in apartheid South Africa, this study considers censorship discourse a compelling barometer of the state's attitude towards male homosexuality during this time. Second, via comparison with contemporaneous homoerotic commodities distributed in apartheid South Africa, accessed from the GALA Queer Archive, this article suggests that AB's visual language uniquely challenged heteronormative associations with the South African landscape to open the nation to queer possibilities.

TheorizingKuirlombismosand Black Liberation across the Diaspora

This essay has three goals: First, to illustrate the epistemological interventions of Black Brazilian queer artivists in theories of Black liberation through naming and defining their sexual-dissident-subjectivities and the affective modes they engender, such as the feeling of solidão (solitude). Second, to contribute to efforts to decolonize the academy in the Americas more broadly, by pointing to the emergent Black queer archives and repertoires that Black queer artivists are intentionally producing outside the Brazilian academy. And third, to highlight how, why, and where Black queer theory is being produced in Brazil, to avoid crediting privileged (in this case, white mestizo) actors within the Brazilian academy for the intellectual production of Black queer theorists who generally do not have access to the transnational academic sphere.

Vertical Integration (I visited Vince Aletti)

An essay about the interior of Vince Aletti’s home in the context of queer archival practices.

Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style, by Abigail Joseph

Reviewed by: Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style by Abigail Joseph Alison Matthews David (bio) Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style, by Abigail Joseph; pp. xiii + 308. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2019, $79.50, $39.50 paper. The first chapter of Abigail Joseph's book, "Dress and Drag Around 1870," conjured up a vivid personal encounter with Victorian fashion. The queer readings of high Victorian style for which Joseph convincingly argues help me retroactively to understand the 1873 fashion plate that sat, framed, on our bathroom counter during my early childhood a century later. On this plate, women and girls promenaded in a park dressed in attire that my equally flamboyantly clad orange-polyester-shirted and plaid-bellbottom-trousered self found both bizarre and enticing. This 1970s self would have looked boyish in the extreme by the standards of Victorian girlhood. Who were these doll-like people, dressed in layer after extravagant layer of blue and white fabric, ribbons, flounces and lace, with odd hats perched on their heads? Joseph singles out the 1870s as a decade known for its excessive ornamentation. It was also a decade known for the performative quality that it imparted to the wardrobes of both fashionable women and cross-dressers, like Ernest (Stella) Boulton and Frederick (Fanny) Park. As the owner of a magical childhood dress-up box, it is no wonder that I was entranced by the styles worn in a decade when fashion took on the quality of "costumes … for a 'fancydress ball,' a masquerade, outfits intended to transfigure their wearer into someone she (or he) is not, to serve as the visual and material apparatus enabling a material role to be played, the boundaries of identities to be blurred" (33). Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style does an excellent job of situating and queering some of the most exaggeratedly extreme decades in Victorian feminine style and silhouettes. Joseph's framework provides a welcome and sympathetic lens through which scholars across a range of disciplines can re-view queer affective networks and archives through things, with a focus on dress and ephemera in particular. This lens is welcome in the context of a pandemic-influenced style landscape that provoked a renewed interest in nonbinary forms of dress and expression. Through her nuanced exploration of the many lacunae and silences in the queer archives, as well as by reading the sometimes surprising presences, Joseph's book speaks to the sensual and [End Page 163] sensory importance of small objects, from pets to letters, as they circulated in queer networks, having profound impacts on the lives and experiences of all those who came into contact with them. As dress and gender have always been linked in the most visible and tangible ways, it is particularly pertinent to view the mid- and high Victorian periods, often seen as two of the most binary and polarized periods in fashion, through multiple queer and trans lenses. Though this was a period when young boys wore dresses until they were breeched, the author argues, it was also a historical moment when questions of sexuality were being reformulated. Dress was literally policed by the imposition of dress laws in many places worldwide, a process intimately linked with racism and colonization, as Clare Sears powerfully demonstrates in their groundbreaking book Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (2014). My own field, fashion studies, has produced a wide range of texts, classic and contemporary, that focus on the ways in which dress has played with the gender binary. From Peter McNeil's Pretty Gentlemen: Macaroni Men and the Eighteenth-Century Fashion World (2018) to Ben Barry and Andrew Reilly's edited volume Crossing Gender Boundaries: Fashion to Create, Disrupt and Transcend (2020), which examines male Victorian corset or belt wearing and early bifurcated skirts for women, scholars continue to be interested in how dress embodies and displays gender nonconformity. Exquisite Materials divides its subject matter into four chapters. Three focus on case studies where style, either literary or sartorial, was actually criminalized in a legal context because of its associations with queer sexualities. These...

Queer Archival Autoethnography in Ken Gonzales-Day’s Bone-Grass Boy

In 2017, queer Chicanx artist Ken Gonzales-Day put on an elaborate installation, titled Bone-Grass Boy, of glossy photographs, sculpture, mural, and mixed-media all seemingly taking place within the nineteenth-century US-Mexico borderlands. Accompanying the photographs is an old manuscript, also titled Bone-Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River, written by Ramoncita Gonzales in 1892. Gonzales-Day’s piece was inspired by a photograph he saw of his ancestor, a gender ambiguous person possibly named Ramoncita. Bone-Grass Boy, I suggest, is a type of speculative and performative archival practice through which Gonzales-Day brings together the erased histories of people of mixed racial, gendered, and sexual identities. I argue that the manipulation of media such as photography and the creation of a speculative archive is a type of queer archival practice that offers Ramoncita a place in history through Gonzales-Day’s queer present. I call this methodology “queer archival autoethnography,” which keeps close eyes on one’s own performative position in the archive, refusing any subject-object divide as well as past-present divide of either privileged or minoritarian archival encounters.

Our Own Images and Truths?: The Futures and Failures of the Queer Appalachia Project

Abstract In August of 2020, a Washington Post article, written by author Emma Eisenberg, convincingly alleged that popular LGBTQ+ Instagram account @queerappalachia had engaged in financial dishonesty, the unapproved use of artists’ works, and an overall lack of transparency regarding their mutual aid efforts. Simply put, Queer Appalachia harmed the very same people that they claimed to represent—Appalachians who are queer, BIPOC (black, Indigenous, [and] people of color), working-class, and/or disabled. For all of these harms and failures, however, the Queer Appalachia Instagram account and ’zine, Electric Dirt, remain unique texts that challenge the metronormative and whitewashed stereotypes of Appalachia. I use theories of queer archives and contemporary understandings of race in Appalachia to explore how the Queer Appalachia Instagram account and Electric Dirt still provide invaluable subversions of the popular caricatures of the region. I additionally interrogate the controversy around Queer Appalachia, looking at how capitalist appropriation of mutual aid, digital blackface, and faulty metaphors of “decolonization” harmed many communities in Appalachia. My aim is not to vindicate Queer Appalachia but to highlight the group's successes and failures, salvage the important work that they have done, and hopefully provide a helpful model for future endeavors in Appalachia and beyond.