Queering Archives
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Summary: Reassessing the Archival Turn in Queer Theory
Kate Eichhorn
While theorists have evoked the archive as a powerful trope to grapple
with everything from subcultural excess to collective trauma, a
generation of queer artists has turned to the archive to explore the
aesthetic and political efficacy of everything from everyday objects to
the refuse of abandoned radical movements. Along the way, the archive
has become shorthand for all kinds of things from films and art
installations to bodies and communities of dissent. Put into circulation
in queer theory and contemporary art and performance, however, what we
think about as an archive has not only expanded but also come undone.
Without fully rejecting this queering of the archive, this paper
questions at what cost and at what cost to whom the archive has been
recast in queer theory and more generally, cultural theory.
Specifically, this paper considers what and whose narratives, including
whose narratives of labor, are placed under erasure by this semantic
drift and most critically, whether the archive’s expanded definition
under queer theory necessarily serves the long-term interests of queer
communities and more broadly, radical social movements.
What’s The T?: Gossip, Anonymity and Black Queer Historiography
Kwame Holmes
This essay explores the possibility of rumor and gossip, oral traditions
that resist professionalized archival spaces, as an alternative source
of black LGBT historiography surrounding the relationship between black
and gay identity and politics during the critical decades of the 1970s. I
examine a set of unconfirmed rumors that circulate within Black Queer
social networks in Washington, D.C. concerning the sexual orientation of
Rev. Douglas Moore’s son. Moore was president of the Black United Front
and one of the biggest opponents of gay liberal activism in the 1970s
(his 1976 campaign for city council was organized against Guns, Grass
and Gays). Yet Moore also employed a number of non- heterosexual (though
not necessarily gay identified) black men in his campaign operation. In
“off the record” conversations with one of Moore’s former employees, a
man I call “Chris,” I was told that Moore emerged as a strong opponent
to gay rights after catching his son in bed with another man. Offered up
as a response to my inquiry into what Moore’s homophobia “was all
about,” the rumor does work to reconcile the identitarian crisis
produced by the oppositional affective and political geographies that
are often demanded by mutually exclusive notions of black radical and
white gay liberal politics in the nineteen seventies. By emphasizing a
set of intimate family relations as the source of Moore’s anti-gay
rhetoric, (and in refusing to link their names with the stories) is a
profound metaphor for the way local emotional networks often precluded
black participation in gay movements populated by predominately recent
white migrants to the city. Most critically though, is that regardless
of the rumor’s facticity, its circulation reveals black queer people’s
uneven access to archival territory in the post- Civil Rights/proto
gentrified city and offers queer historians an opportunity to push back
against the ways gentrification displaces black bodies and histories
from gay and lesbian community.
Archiving Pleasures: Some Queer Comparisons
Daniel Marshall
This paper, co-authored with Zeb Tortorici, reflects on the histories of
LGBT/queer archives and the ways in which these archives frame key
contemporary questions about the politics and practices of histories of
sexuality and gender. Many gay and lesbian archives and historical
collections emerged during the liberationist 1970s, and in different
parts of the world these archives are grappling with the pressures of
generational transition brought on by the aging of the founding
generation. This paper locates itself at this transitional moment,
reflecting on uses of LGBTQ archives, as well as the specific ways in
which particular “queer” pleasures and desires—archival, historical,
political and sexual—serve to inform the logics, subjects, and erasures
of archives. We are especially interested in interrogating how some
queer archival narratives privilege models of subject recovery, such
that they purport to recuperate (queer) voices and subjectivities of the
past. Whether or not they are articulated as such, do queer archives
reassert traditional notions of archival authority, or do they seek to
alter the idiom through which the subjects of the archive are
constructed? While avoiding simplistic laudatory readings of queer
archive formation, our goal is to examine the complications, erasures,
and racial/gendered/class implications of queer archival engagements (as
well as the ways in which some queer archives and archivists struggle
against such phenomena).
Dress to Repress: Materializing Queerness and Disability in the Archive
David Serlin
This presentation will examine the multiple (and routinely ignored)
political and artifactual relationships between objects of LGBTQ history
and objects of disability history as collected, preserved, and often
exhibited in museums archives in North America. In particular, this
presentation will seek to connect and problematize recently exhibited
articles of clothing, equipment, and accessories from the archives of
Chicago’s Leather Archives & Museum and Canada’s Royal Ontario
Museum. Drawing upon recent historical and ethnographic scholarship on
the politics of archival practice as well as recent museum studies
scholarship on collecting and exhibiting objects, this presentation will
put diverse material objects – ranging from straitjackets and handcuffs
to crutches and catheters – into dialogue into order to draw attention
to the putative distinctions around ablebodied and disabled social
practices and between histories of sexual subcultures and histories of
disability representation and memory.
Zeb Tortorici, Introduction, Queering Archives
Kwame Holmes, What’s The T?: Gossip, Anonymity and Black Queer Historiography
This essay explores the possibility of rumor and gossip, oral traditions that resist professionalized archival spaces, as an alternative source of black LGBT historiography surrounding the relationship between black and gay identity and politics during the critical decades of the 1970s. I examine a set of unconfirmed rumors that circulate within Black Queer social networks in Washington, D.C. concerning the sexual orientation of Rev. Douglas Moore’s son. Moore was president of the Black United Front and one of the biggest opponents of gay liberal activism in the 1970s (his 1976 campaign for city council was organized against Guns, Grass and Gays). Yet Moore also employed a number of non- heterosexual (though not necessarily gay identified) black men in his campaign operation. In “off the record” conversations with one of Moore’s former employees, a man I call “Chris,” I was told that Moore emerged as a strong opponent to gay rights after catching his son in bed with another man. Offered up as a response to my inquiry into what Moore’s homophobia “was all about,” the rumor does work to reconcile the identitarian crisis produced by the oppositional affective and political geographies that are often demanded by mutually exclusive notions of black radical and white gay liberal politics in the nineteen seventies. By emphasizing a set of intimate family relations as the source of Moore’s anti-gay rhetoric, (and in refusing to link their names with the stories) is a profound metaphor for the way local emotional networks often precluded black participation in gay movements populated by predominately recent white migrants to the city. Most critically though, is that regardless of the rumor’s facticity, its circulation reveals black queer people’s uneven access to archival territory in the post- Civil Rights/proto gentrified city and offers queer historians an opportunity to push back against the ways gentrification displaces black bodies and histories from gay and lesbian community.
Daniel Marshall, Archiving Pleasures: Some Queer Comparisons
This paper, co-authored with Zeb Tortorici, reflects on the histories of LGBT/queer archives and the ways in which these archives frame key contemporary questions about the politics and practices of histories of sexuality and gender. Many gay and lesbian archives and historical collections emerged during the liberationist 1970s, and in different parts of the world these archives are grappling with the pressures of generational transition brought on by the aging of the founding generation. This paper locates itself at this transitional moment, reflecting on uses of LGBTQ archives, as well as the specific ways in which particular “queer” pleasures and desires—archival, historical, political and sexual—serve to inform the logics, subjects, and erasures of archives. We are especially interested in interrogating how some queer archival narratives privilege models of subject recovery, such that they purport to recuperate (queer) voices and subjectivities of the past. Whether or not they are articulated as such, do queer archives reassert traditional notions of archival authority, or do they seek to alter the idiom through which the subjects of the archive are constructed? While avoiding simplistic laudatory readings of queer archive formation, our goal is to examine the complications, erasures, and racial/gendered/class implications of queer archival engagements (as well as the ways in which some queer archives and archivists struggle against such phenomena).
Kate Eichhorn, Reassessing the Archival Turn in Queer Theory
While theorists have evoked the archive as a powerful trope to grapple with everything from subcultural excess to collective trauma, a generation of queer artists has turned to the archive to explore the aesthetic and political efficacy of everything from everyday objects to the refuse of abandoned radical movements. Along the way, the archive has become shorthand for all kinds of things from films and art installations to bodies and communities of dissent. Put into circulation in queer theory and contemporary art and performance, however, what we think about as an archive has not only expanded but also come undone. Without fully rejecting this queering of the archive, this paper questions at what cost and at what cost to whom the archive has been recast in queer theory and more generally, cultural theory. Specifically, this paper considers what and whose narratives, including whose narratives of labor, are placed under erasure by this semantic drift and most critically, whether the archive’s expanded definition under queer theory necessarily serves the long-term interests of queer communities and more broadly, radical social movements.
Q&A
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