Beyond Pillars of Evidence: Exploring the Shaky Ground of Queer/ed Archives and their Methodologies (original) (raw)

2015, Research in the Archival Multiverse

Abstract

In this chapter, I critically consider the ways that heteronormativity, homonormativity, and the politics of respectability come together to both haunt and produce the digital narratives that constitute the Arizona Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Storytelling Project, in order to discover how memories are sometimes disciplined to re-produce normative narratives about queer pasts. I look and listen for the queering potentials in shared stories and in the digital and participatory technologies that record them. While conversations about “queering the archive” are not new and are, in fact, taking place transnationally, these conversations are extended here to explore the ways in which conformity to archival norms can be treacherous. I ask whether an archive can be a space of radical intervention or if it must always and only be a repository for stories that reproduce normative iterations of histories that inform powerful and normativizing national imaginaries. For those of us committed to intervening in traditional archival constructs and related practices of collecting and documenting, we can see that such practices run the risk of reproducing sexual normativities and social divisions.We should, therefore, understand the queer/ed archive as always in motion—forming and re-forming itself as we constitute and re-member its collections. Ultimately, this chapter argues for the need to develop a Queer/ed Archival Methodology, Q/M, to help ensure that complex, non-normative, and even contradictory histories have their places in society’s record.

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References (106)

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  48. Anne J. Gilliland, "Afterword: In and Out of the Archives." Archival Science 10 (2010), 339.
  49. Francis. X. Blouin, Jr. "Archivists, Meditation, and Constructs of Social Memory." Archival Issues 24, no. 2 (1999), 110.
  50. I write in sincere gratitude to Professor Ken McAllister who challenged me with new ways of thinking about archives, archival methodologies, and their unique relationship to qualitative research methods. I have learned so much through our conversations about popular/mass culture archives and the "GONZO" gut instincts that drive each of us in our own archival trajectories. Listening to our guts is certainly the force behind how we know and how we question what we know. Thank you.
  51. In the past I have used the term "marginalised," but realise that its use automatically positions a subject as inside or outside while Licona's term helps me to understand the different spaces and places where we each may carry varying weight of privilege(s) based on our assembling and overlapping identity categories.
  52. Adela C. Licona, Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric. Albany, NY: State University New York Press, 2012, p.12.
  53. Licona's work on third space theory and specifically on borderlands rhetorics highlights the ways in which borders have come to mark the division between two parts; however, at this division is the overlap of the both/and. For example, in Zines in Third Space, she discusses third space theory as the generative space in which, as a young girl, her Mexican-American family made meaning of the Dick and Jane books taught in their U.S. grade schools with the naming of their dog 'Lunares,' which is translated in English as 'Spot' or 'mole.' She explores the liminality of the border and binaries in order to inquire into the politics of articulation and practices of coalition building in these spaces that are intended to separate, but, in reality, become creative and productive spaces of coming together. Licona, Zines in Third Space, 131.
  54. The concept of "society's record" comes from Jesse Shera, an influential theorist in the field of Library and Information Science. His 1972 book, The Foundations of Education for Librarianship, develops his theories based on an historical and sociological understanding of society and its variable relationship to its recorded knowledge. Shera argued that, "…the role of the librarian in society is that of a mediator between man and his graphic records." See Jesse Hauk Shera, The Foundations of Education for Librarianship. New York: Becker and Hayes, 1972, p. 193. In an earlier paper, I have argued that the librarian, archivist, and information professional are more than a mediator. Rather than a single focus on mediation, I have considered a cartographic representation to highlight the multiple pathways to information while also emphasising the active reciprocal and collaborative connections in the production and consumption of knowledges.
  55. Richard Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology. Chicago, IL: Society of American Archivists, 2005. http://www2.archivists.org/glossary.
  56. 8 Society of American Archivists (SAA) website: http://www2.archivists.org/; William J. Maher, "Archives, Archivists, and Society." American Archivist 6 no.2 (Fall 1998), p. 252-265. Incoming presidential address delivered 30 August 1997.
  57. 9 Terry Cook, "What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift." Archivaria 43 (1997): 17.
  58. Andrew Flinn highlights the ways that a multitude of archives and archival formations might, in fact, look more alike than we might think. He suggests viewing them "as diverse expressions of a similar activity rather than emphasize the differences." Andrew Flinn. "The Impact of Independent and Community Archives on Professional Archival Thinking and Practice" in The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping: a Reader. Jennie Hill, ed. London: Facet Publishing, 2011, p.148
  59. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, PLACE: Penguin Books, 1993, p.188.
  60. Ibid., 7.
  61. Gloria Anzaldúa. "To(o) Queer the Writer-Loca, escritora y chicana." In Living Chicana Theory. Carla Trujillo, ed. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 1998, pp.263-264.
  62. K.J. Rawson, "Archiving Transgender: Affects, Logics, and the Power of Queer History." PhD diss. Syracuse, 2010, p.3. 15 Ibid., 70.
  63. Gayatri Spivak raises concerns about the archives being considered a repository of facts and the urgency to enter the archives with the intention to "read" them as representations and constructed histories. She argues "this is 'literature' in the general sense-the archives selectively preserving the changeover of the episteme-as its condition' with 'literature in the narrow sense-all the genres-as its effect." Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, p.203.
  64. Iris van der Tuin, "Jumping Generations: Back to the LGBT Futures in the Feminist Archive." Presentation given as part of the Queer Connections Speaker Series through the Institute of LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona, 21 March 2013.
  65. For an of-colour critique of the waves metaphor, see Krista Jacob and Adela C. Licona, "Writing the Waves: A Dialogue on the Tools, Tactics, and Tensions of Feminisms and Feminist Practices over Time and Place," NWSA Journal, 17, no. 1 (Spring, 2005): 197-205.
  66. For further reading on the elevation of the white male experience (gay or straight) as that which is considered universal and a generality when compared to bodies of color, see also Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York & London: New York University Press, 2005, p.4.
  67. Terry Cook, "What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift." Archivaria 43 (1997): 31.
  68. Visit the website for the Learning Games Initiative Research Archive (LGIRA) to learn more about McAllister and Ruggill's concept of preservation through use as they offer the only circulating video game archive in the world: http://lgira.mesmernet.org/.
  69. Berlant calls on Homi Bhabha's argument from "The Other Question" that "the stereotype is an essential mental ligament of modern national culture, as the common possession of aesthetic and discursive 'national' objects provides an affective intimacy among citizens that no commonly memorised political genealogy or mass experience of democracy has yet successfully effected." The national stereotype is a hybrid form, a form of feeling, of alienation, and of sociality while also becoming varying degrees of control between the normative and non-normative subjects as well as between non-normative multiply- situated subjects themselves working much like the politics of respectability. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1997, p.103.
  70. Ibid..
  71. See Wendy Brown's States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
  72. Eve Tuck, Urban Youth and School Pushout: Gateways, Get-aways, and the GED. New York: Routledge, 2011, p.4.
  73. Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2011; Vicki L. Eaklor, Queer America: A People's GLBT History of the United States. New York: The New Press, 2008; Susan Stryker. Transgender History. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008.
  74. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham first coined the term "politics of respectability" to describe the work of the Women's Convention of the Black Baptist Church during the Progressive Era. Higginbotham specifically referred to African American's promotion of temperance, cleanliness of person and property, thrift, polite manners, and sexual purity. Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
  75. Deborah B. Gould. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight Against AIDS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, p.89.
  76. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner. "Sex in Public." Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader, Robert J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi, eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, pp.179-80.
  77. During the 1950s and 1960s, the politics of respectability and of heteronormativity were at play in the development and growth of early homophile organisations such as The Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis. As Boyd highlights, a tension existed between bar owners/bar goers and the homophile activists because the former were concerned with securing the right to public space for lesbian and gay people while the latter were concerned with acceptance and especially assimilation. Although they shared the public space of bars and found mutual interests empowering, the homophile activist organisations in San Francisco were working towards an "assimilationist project of social uplift, using language of integration and often time expressing disdain for queer and gender-transgressive qualities of bar-based communities." Boyd, Nan Alamilla. Wide Open Town: a History of Queer San Francisco to 1965, University of California Press, 2003, p.162. Gay and lesbian visibility at this time produced high levels of fear and stress for those who were visible as well as those who were not. One of the main concerns for the Daughters of Bilitis was how they each would build their own self-esteem and self-worth while trying to build a community. These homophile activists worked to project respectable public images of lesbians and gay men and at times turned their backs on the diversity of the lesbian and gay community in order to be accepted into the mainstream.
  78. Anne Gilliland, "Afterword: In and Out of the Archives." Archival Science 10 (2010): 339.
  79. Adela C. Licona's keynote address titled "Mi'ja, just say you're a feminist like you used to…": Pa/trolling & Performing Queer Rhetorics in the Everyday at the Queering Spaces/Queering Borders Queer Studies Conference at University of North Carolina-Asheville, April 2013.
  80. Gloria Anzaldúa, "To(o) Queer the Writer-Loca, Escritora y Chicana." Living Chicana Theory, Carla Trujillo, ed. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 1998, p.264.
  81. Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Adela C. Licona, "Moving Locations: The Politics of Identities in Motion," NWSA Journal 17, no. 2 (2005): 11.
  82. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Mankato: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p.xvi.
  83. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, p.xx.
  84. Ibid., xix.
  85. Ibid., xviii.
  86. Kimberlé Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." University of Chicago Legal Forum. (1989): 139-167.
  87. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, p. 212. 41 Ibid., 211.
  88. Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Adela C. Licona, "Moving Locations: The Politics of Identities in Motion," NWSA Journal 17, no. 2 (2005): 12.
  89. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, p. xx.
  90. Mattachine Society, "Mattachine Review" 2, no. 1 (January 1956) and Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town, University of California Press, 2003, p. 159.
  91. Gould. Moving Politics, p. 89.
  92. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003, p.50.
  93. Scott Lauria Morgensen, "Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities," in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies special edition on Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity, Daniel Heath Justice, Mark Rifkin, and Bethany Schneider, eds. 16 nos.1-2 (2010): 105.
  94. See Jasbir Puar, "Circuits of Queer Mobility: Tourism, Travel, and Globalization," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8 nos.1-2 (2002): 101-137; and Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. New York: Routledge, 2000, and "Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture." Cultural Critique, 29 (1994): 31-76.
  95. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, "Sex in Public." Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader, Robert J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi, eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p.175.
  96. Kimberly Christen, "Access and Accountability: The Ecology of Information Sharing in the Digital Age." Anthropology News (2009): 4.
  97. Gilliland, "Afterword," 339.
  98. Kevin P. Murphy, "Gay Was Good: Progress, Homonormativity, and Oral History." In Queer Twin Cities: Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project. Mankato: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, p.307.
  99. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, p.22.
  100. Horacio N. Roque Ramírez. "Gay Latino Histories/Dying to be Remembered: AIDS Obituaries, Public Memory, and the Queer Latino Archive." In Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America, Gina M. Pérez, Frank Andre Guridy and Adrian Burgos, eds. New York: New York University Press, 2010, p.105.
  101. Andrea Smith, "Queer Theory and Native Studies: The Heteronormativity of Settler Colonialism," in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies special edition on Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity, Daniel Heath Justice, Mark Rifkin, and Bethany Schneider, eds. 16 nos. 1-2 (2010): 45.
  102. Michael Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, Michael Warner, ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p.xvii.
  103. Hiram Perez, "You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!" Social Text, nos. 84-85 (2005): 187.
  104. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p.8.
  105. Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999, p.5.
  106. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, p. xiii.