Queer Archive Research Articles

“A Passive Homosexual Element”

This essay reflects on archival digitalization and its implications for researchers interested in historicizing queerness. The essay seeks a conversation about how new archival tools boost our access to particular constructions of subjectivity while simultaneously limiting the extent to which we can discern the parameters of queerness. It draws on the author's recent work with archives of several state security agencies from Brazil's military regime (1964–85). The collections have undergone digitalization, such that access is now largely computerized. Finding aids rely not only on archivists' descriptions but on optical character recognition. The essay offers some analysis of the role of identity politics in shaping researchers' frameworks, as well as those of historical subjects, and of what such processes do to the space and practice of the queer archive.

Laughter in the Archives: Jackie “Moms” Mabley and the Haunted Diva

Abstract Scholars and cultural critics often cite Jackie “Moms” Mabley as the first African American stand-up comedienne. Mabley’s career spanned sixty years, from minstrel shows in the early 1900s to sold-out performances at the Apollo in the 1960s. At the peak of her fame, Mabley was one of the country’s most popular comedians and a major figure in the Civil Rights movement. Unfortunately, Mabley’s place in history is marginal at best. This article proposes an intervention in Mabley’s archive by reading her work through three themes: (1) quare/queer performance; (2) Black feminist performance of temporality and (3) re-membering Black feminist agency. I conclude with a call to continue the expansion of queer archives and critical analysis of Mabley’s work. I address these historiographical deficiencies to celebrate her brave and innovative performances, as Mabley’s humor intertwined entertainment and feminist/anti-racist politics to cut through the pains and silences of pre-Civil Rights United States.

Preservations of Silence in the Queer Archive

Ditzler's recording blurs the lines between theory, aural ethnography, and critical intervention. Framed as an attempt to archive a site-specific "telling" of one queer-identified man's history, it is in the recording's failure to capture that telling as a "whole" (i.e., in ways that perpetuate the fantasy of unmediated access to the past by rendering the fact of recording invisible) that the piece's queer potentialities emerge.

The queer limit of black memory: black lesbian literature and irresolution

Matt Richardson frames The Queer Limit of Black Memory with a visit to San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). Amid MoAD’s efforts to make black bodies of the diaspora visible, Richardson sees no representations of black queer bodies; rather, the museum aligns with mainstream narratives reinscribing normative gender, family, and respectability politics—a well-worn response to centuries’ circulations of narratives pathologizing black familial and kinship structures. This “queer limit” to mainstream historiographical, rhetorical, and material representations of black people renders black queer people invisible. In response, Richardson advocates an alternative MoAD, celebrating the queer “Messiness of the African Diaspora” (5). Drawing from an expansive range of understudied literary genres, Richardson’s compelling book analyzes how black lesbian fiction—as a queer archive— provides potential, sparking “an irresolute revision” of normative black vernacular traditions and archives (16). He reenvisions the past through queer epistemological methods rooted in embodied knowledge and (at times) patterned after performance. His text unfurls a performative process/politics of irresolution, illustrating how erotics and desire operate within and among often-conflicting tensions of pain and pleasure, tradition and rebellion, home and unhomeliness. Richardson puts into fruitful and clear conversation scholars who might not be read (yet) across disciplines, citing African and African diaspora studies, literary theory, queer and trans* studies, performance studies, history, and psychoanalytic theory. Finding evidence of the body, particularly of black (queer) women’s desire and pleasure in the phallogoocularcentric (i.e., a male-centered and visual text-based) archive is an arduous task. Chapter 1 considers four neo-slave narratives from the past thirty years. For Richardson, these nonrealist, historiographic texts featuring “woman-to-woman sexual relations” posit “a version of the enslaved female body ((( BOOK REVIEW

Lost and Never Found: The Queer Archive of Feelings and Its Historical Propriety

In the ongoing research and activism concerning the queer archive of feelings, few historians have openly engaged in the discussion on the limits and possibilities of the archive. This article, written by a historian, provides a critical perspective on this debate and an analysis of historicity, historical methodology and, foremost, fantasy. Does the “scholar’s archive,” as defined by Ann Cvetkovich, even exist? Is there really such an unambiguous difference between the historian’s view on the traditional archive, filled with bureaucratic waste, and the allegedly radical archive of feelings, consisting of ephemera and “feelings”? Is it not with the future in mind that both the historian and the queer archivist insist on conserving documents and feelings alike? Such questions lead to a discussion on the importance of not giving up the Lacanian definition of the negative as applied by Lee Edelman. The author claims that it is through a deradicalizing (or rather depsychoanalyzing) of the negative that the idea of a queer archive loses its way. The implications of the negative on queer theory and politics are brought up through analysis of an art exhibition featuring internationally established queer artists and described as a unique and radical queer archival activism that scorns the traditional archive for excluding (queer) feelings. Following Edelman, this article reaches a different conclusion, wherein the traditional archive may be seen in a new light—or rather, in a new darkness where the dead are painfully absent and helpless, reminding us of the meaninglessness of reproductive futurism.

If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past by Christopher Castiglia, Christopher Reed (review)

Reviewed by: If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past by Christopher Castiglia, Christopher Reed Thomas R. Dunn If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. By Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012; pp. 259, $25.00 paper. Now appears to be a timely moment to reflect upon the queer past. Every month, the media seems to herald another “historic” achievement for the gay and lesbian rights movement. Depictions of the queer past increasingly appear in public spheres, spaces, and screens few observers would have expected even a few years ago. Academics and artists have also become preoccupied with the queer experience of time, as concepts like temporality, futurity, feeling backwards, the death drive, and public memory continue to prompt intense intellectual investigations. It therefore seems appropriate that in If Memory Serves, Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed bring together a selection of their previous work on queer memory with new and revised chapters especially for this project. Within the book’s pages, readers will find moments of impressive historical, cultural, and theoretical synthesis, as well as pointed challenges to many of the most basic assumptions of contemporary queer culture and scholarship. At its core, the book puts forward two central claims. First, the authors suggest that in the wake of the devastating losses of the AIDS epidemic in the gay community, “gay neo-cons” successfully called for the “de-generational unremembering” (10) of the promiscuous and experimental sexual culture popularized during the 1960s and 1970s. Characterizing this era as immature, whorish, and ultimately responsible for the virus and its destructive effects, the neo-cons encouraged gay men to reject the now-past sexual revolution and focus on building a more mainstreamed gay future marked by conventional goals like marriage, adoption, and military service. Second, the authors posit that this forgetting has done great harm to generations of gay men whom now live detached from their collective past and its communal values. As such, Castiglia and Reed argue that returning to memory and consideration of the pre-AIDS past may help ease existing traumas within gay life by inspiring alternatives for belonging and queer worldmaking in a new century. [End Page 221] In advancing these claims, the authors are largely successful. By analyzing a broad range of artifacts (films, novels, and visual culture) over several chapters, Castiglia and Reed demonstrate the pervasive nature of de-generational discourses. The authors also take a case study approach to investigate queer uses of the built environment, architecture, art, and camp dialogue, illustrating memory’s potential to suture persistent pains caused by the severing of queer generations. Throughout the book, the authors’ ability to skillfully navigate and synthesize dense theoretical arguments from queer theory and temporality studies is noteworthy, providing a relatively accessible point of entry to a conversation many readers might otherwise find impenetrable. Likewise, the authors continually attempt to engage both “high theory” and popular culture in their analysis, cognizant that the lines between these two areas of cultural criticism have increasingly blurred. In addition, the book itself functions as a queer archive, pointing to earlier discourses many readers may not have previously encountered. One of the strongest contributions of the project is the concept of ideality politics, identified by Castiglia and Reed as an alternative to discredited identity politics and the pervasive pessimism they see in much of queer theory. Turning to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of acedia, the authors posit ideality as a tool that fuses loss and idealism, defying the cynicism directed at each term individually. As such, ideality encourages “creating ideal images to forestall losses that have not yet happened,” through memory (184). In this way, returning to the past no longer needs to be traumatizing and the ideal need not be dismissed as mere utopia. Instead, preserving and protecting the past against (potential) future losses offers opportunities to make remembering a productive and rewarding undertaking. Nonetheless, for all that is to be commended in this book, some glaring concerns arise as the reader moves through the chapters. One of the most prominent is, ironically, time itself. At moments, the book feels outdated and...

Conversations on Queer Affect and Queer Archives

More than a repository of objects or texts, the archive is the very process of selecting, ordering, and preserving the past—in short, of making history. Artists, scholars, and activists have been rethinking the politics of what archives preserve, demonstrating that the piecing together of cultural memory is not a neutral pursuit.

Imaginary Archives: A Dialogue

As there are many kinds of queer histories, so too are there many types of queer archives: band ones, tender ones, bureaucratic ones. But perhaps the queerest things about archives are their silences— their telling blanks and perversely willful holes. The filmmaker Cheryl Dunye has consistently explored the affective potency that lies within historical records—and the gaps in those records—to explore how fictional archives might be necessary for queer fives in the present as well as for imagined futures.

Queering Ireland, In the Archives

On June 16, 2008, the National Library of Ireland officially accepted the Irish Queer Archive, a community-based archive of lesbian and gay historical and cultural materials, a transfer both literal and symbolic, marking the importance of lesbian and gay history to the nation's history. This essay briefly examines the issues associated with this transfer of materials to an institutional home, a transfer that confers legitimacy and authority but also raises questions about access and inclusion (particularly gender inclusion), as well as questions about the nature and purpose of queer archives. To illustrate some of these questions, the author offers a number of textual and visual materials: a small archive project of Irish queer history, concentrating primarily on literary materials (that have not been published or have limited availability) and organized around four broad categories of history, space, language, and performance. Included here are: excerpts from Sea Urchins, an unpublished but historically important play by Aodhan Madden, a play inspired by one of the most important public protests in Irish gay and lesbian history, the 1983 Stop Violence Against Gays and Women March; an unpublished English translation of one section of Micheál Ó Conghaile's groundbreaking novel, Sna Fir; examples of lesbian visual culture; a collection of poems from community journals (suggesting, perhaps, the importance of artistic expression to political activism); and imagery from Alternative Miss Ireland and the Emerald Warriors gay rugby club.

An Archive of Anecdotes: Raising Lesbian Consciousness after the Daughters of Bilitis

This essay attends to the archive as an “inventional site for rhetorical pasts” (Morris, “Introduction”) by examining the construction of a queer archive and its effects on lesbian subjects. Drawing on queer archival theories of ephemera, I argue that Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon's Lesbian/Woman (1972) constitutes an archive of lesbian experience that functioned rhetorically as a communal and identificatory resource. Martin and Lyon rendered the experiences of women associated with the lesbian homophile organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, in the form of “anecdotes” and strategically curated them into middle-class categories designed in direct contrast to the gender and class transgressions of the lesbian bar scene. I identify the rhetorical effect on readers, “archival consciousness raising,” by analyzing autobiographical letters Martin and Lyon received in response and tracing the limits of this effect for more diverse lesbian readers.

The Erotics of an Oil Drum: Queercore, Gay Macho, and the Defiant Sexuality of Extra Fancy's Sinnerman

IN 1996 ATLANTIC RECORDS RELEASED AND almost instantly abandoned an album that asserted uniquely aggressive, macho gay male identity. The songs of Extra Fancy's Sinnerman deal with sadomasochism, violent retribution against gay-bashers, and life with HIV in punk-inflected style that musically reflects the intense aggression of their texts. Extra Fancy first released Sinnerman on the independent label Diablo Musica, but Atlantic immediately picked it up, hoping to use it as catalyst for their new gay marketing division. Eight weeks later the band, along with the division, was dropped, rais[ing] eyebrows among the alternative rock community. (1) Despite Extra Fancy's explicitly homosexual-themed lyrics, only the lead singer of the band was openly gay. Brian Grillo's intimidating muscular body, aggressive stage presence, butch clothing style, and shaved head presented radical gay male image that foregrounded an enraged machismo. His gritty vocal style demonstrated indebtedness to the hardcore-grunge-alternative masculinity of Henry Rollins, Kurt Cobain, and Eddie Vedder as he strutted imposingly on stage, shirtless, banging on fifty-gallon oil drum. Nine years later Extra Fancy was virtually canonized in David Ciminelli and Ken Knox's celebration of the queercore movement, Homocore: The Loud and Raucous Rise of Queer Rock, even as the authors observe that Grillo never had desire to be anything other than performer who rocked--regardless of his sexual orientation. Indeed, in their interview with him he clearly distances himself from the book's subject. Nevertheless, for Ciminelli and Knox, the members of Extra Fancy were once messiahs of the queercore movement. (2) This dissonance invites close consideration of Extra Fancy's constructions of queer identity. The term queercore or homocore can be used to describe number of subcultural and musical practices, but its most common usage--a usage I have found prominent during my localized ethnographic work with Homocore Minneapolis--refers to the channeling of the underground, do-it-yourself ethics associated with punk music and style and their offshoots in order to challenge both heteronormativity and more mainstream images of LGBT life and culture. Despite Grillo's reluctance to associate himself with the queer punk movement, Sinnerman's lyrics explicitly and often graphically address male homosexuality, while its music demonstrates particular variant of the hardcore legacy of queercore style. Still, the privileged place Ciminelli and Knox claim for the band within musical subculture that is in large part defined by fluidity of gender and sexual identity presents significant issues of representation and authority. As Susan McClary notes, the various cultural and artistic discourses at work in society do not simply represent preexisting notions of community and identity but are where the ongoing work of social formation occurs. (3) Extra Fancy challenged some of the most culturally prevalent perceptions about sexual identity and musical gendering during the time in which they were active. This article in part constitutes an attempt--largely driven by Judith Halberstam's call for archiving queer subcultural production, which is frequently and necessarily fleeting--to recover this underappreciated cultural moment, one whose transgressive potential warrants examination. (4) Halberstam describes her conception of queer archive as not simply collection of documentary artifacts but a discursive field and structure of thinking and a theory of cultural relevance, construction of collective memory, and complex record of queer activity. (5) While I wish to place Extra Fancy within the queer archive, I also recognize that this essay necessarily constitutes an initial foray into the explication of the discourses and social structures surrounding the band. Therefore, I primarily approach Extra Fancy from two contextual angles. …

Archival Queer

Archival Queer Charles E. Morris III (bio) Washington, DC, June 1999: The metal detector and visible arsenal at the threshold of the FBI was less intimidating than the archivist's inevitable first query: "So tell me about your interest in J. Edgar Hoover." In reflection, I am reminded of queer historian John Howard's comment, "Obstacles in this project were considerable, not the least of which, my own occasional reluctance to declare: 'I'm researching homosexuality and gender nonconformity in Mississippi.' Given persistent prejudices there as elsewhere, such a flat, unadorned statement would have assured a lack of cooperation from many I encountered—archivists . . . among them."1 For my own part, I confess that were I not confident in the FBI's reputation for candor, cooperation, and commitment to the Freedom of Information Act, not to mention its heartening history, begun with Hoover, of championing the GLBTQ (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, Queer) community, I might have interpreted my archival experiences there—the arctic temperature in the so-called reading room, the mysterious disappearance of an index to the files, the redacted documents, the photocopies that the "assistant" continually but, of course, inadvertently handed to the historian sitting next to me—as in some important sense politically motivated. Chicago, November 2004: On a panel devoted to Robert Ridinger's recently published anthology, Speaking for Our Lives: Historic Speeches and Rhetoric for Gay and Lesbian Rights,2 I disclosed that beholding this volume for the first time was a moving experience. Queer archives affect me viscerally, evoking deep yearning and defiant purpose. At that moment I remembered Countee Cullen's response to Edward Carpenter's Ioläus, the activist anthology of male friendship, of historical queerness, that booksellers apparently called the "bugger's bible." In 1923 Cullen wrote to Alain Locke, who had recommended it, "'It opened up for me soul windows which had been closed; it threw a noble and evident light on what I had begun to believe, because of what the world believes, ignoble and unnatural. I loved myself in it.'"3 I also remembered sitting beneath the gaze of George Washington in Princeton's archive at the exhilarating moment I discovered behind penciled excisions the queer American [End Page 145] love story of the 1930s that adventurer Richard Halliburton's executors and biographers had hoped to consign to oblivion. Awash in these memories, the poignancy of Ridinger's title stood in bold relief: queer lives, past and present, are constituted by voices that swell with the complex measures of our joys and our struggles against annihilating silence. As Jonathan Ned Katz astutely observed of these cultural and political stakes as he opened his own pathbreaking anthology Gay American History, "To speak our name, to roll that word over the tongue, was to make our existence tangible, physical; it came too close to some mystical union with us, some carnal knowledge of that 'abominable' ghost, that lurking possibility within."4 Nashville, March 2005: In my course on the history of American public address, a frustrated lesbian student came to discuss her stymied quest for a text from GLBTQ history for her final term paper. She couldn't locate one in our textbook, Reid and Klumpp's American Rhetorical Discourse, not in the section entitled "Expanding Civil and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century" or anywhere else in the copious volume. Nor did she have success in searching our rich supplementary archive, the touted website Americanrhetoric.com. Certainly she must be mistaken. No, with the exception of a link to another resource containing interviews and lectures by James Baldwin, there is not a single GLBTQ speech in the massive bank. Perhaps my student can take heart knowing that the archive does include the character Cher's address "All Oppressed People Should Be Allowed Refuge in America" from the epic film Clueless, and the link to Focus on the Family if perchance she decides to "come out" of homosexuality. My rather obvious point here is that archives are indeed rhetorical sites and resources, part of a diverse domain of the usable past that, despite the sincere if not conceited espousals of disinterested custodianship by its representatives, nevertheless functions ideologically and politically...

Harry Stack Sullivan and his chums: archive fever in American psychiatry?

The literature on the life and work of American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan is used to provide a critique of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever. Derrida’s concept of archival violence relies on psychoanalysis both for its epistemology and for its exemplar of archival violence. The Sullivan literature shows how these positions become antagonistic when Derrida’s work is used to think about Freud’s critics. The published literature on Sullivan is described as a queer archive that has been strongly shaped by historical shifts in discourses about homosexuality, but that continues to stimulate and frustrate attempts to know the essential truth about Sullivan. Sullivan scholars have been quick to read his personality theory as autobiography, belittling the importance of friendship in Sullivan’s developmental theory, which differentiates it from the heteronormative Oedipal narrative. It is argued that Derrida’s mode of critique would entrench rather than unearth such heteronormative historiographical moves. Scholars are invited to put Sullivan’s biographies and published works to a broader range of uses in the human sciences.