Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies

The contributors to Turning Archival trace the rise of the archive as an object of historical desire and study within queer studies and examine how it fosters historical imagination and knowledge. Highlighting the growing significance of the archival to LGBTQ scholarship, politics, and everyday life, they draw upon accounts of queer archival encounters in institutional, grassroots, and everyday repositories of historical memory. Among other topics, the contributors examine the everyday life of marginalized queer immigrants in New York City as an archive, second-hand vinyl record collecting and punk bootlegs, the self-archiving practices of grassroots lesbians, and the decolonial potential of absences and gaps in the colonial archives through the life of a suspected hermaphrodite in colonial Guatemala. Engaging with archives from Africa to the Americas to the Arctic, this volume illuminates the allure of the archive, reflects on that which resists archival capture, and outlines the stakes of queer and trans lives in the archival turn.

Contributors. Anjali Arondekar, Kate Clark, Ann Cvetkovich, Carolyn Dinshaw, Kate Eichhorn, Javier Fernandez-Galeano, Emmett Harsin Drager, Elliot James, Marget Long, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Daniel Marshall, Maria Elena Martinez, Joan Nestle, Ivan Ramos, David Serlin, Zeb Tortorici