Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies A wandering archive – a nuanced creative enactment of GLBT histories (original) (raw)

Carrying queerness : queerness, performance and the archive

2013

1 Acknowledgements 2 Introduction: Carrying Queerness 5 Chapter 1: The Artist as Archivist 54 Chapter 2: Cut Pieces 120 Figures 1-5 164 Chapter 3: Looking for Sex in the Archive 169 Chapter 4: Swapping Spit: (Anti)sociality and queer theory 204 Chapter 5: What’s the use in wondering?: Queer Debts 255 Conclusion: P.S.; or practising scholarship 297 Bibliography 304

Onlining queer acts: Digital research ethics and caring for risky archives

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2018

This essay considers how the current compulsion to digital reproductionthe urge to digitize, network, and online previously not-online materialsoffers researchers of and within queer circuits the opportunity to defamiliarize and denaturalize our participation in academic systems of exploitation and to reorient our work towards decolonizing research economies, habits, protocols, and relationships. It takes the Cabaret Commons, the authors' speculative digital archive of and for trans-feminist and queer (TFQ) grassroots performance scenes in Canada, Mexico, and the United States, as its point of departure. The authors frame TFQ performance and party scenes as negotiated intimacies, cultivating ethics of vulnerability and risk, which operate within and as networked intimate publics. Reading across decolonial, queer, feminist, and trans-ethics and methods, this essay revisits the value of ephemerality, of strategic evaporation, non-storage, and forgetting in online research contexts.

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

Research in the Archival Multiverse, 2015

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.

Accidental Orientations: Rethinking Queerness in Archival Times

Surveillance & Society, 2019

This paper critically interrogates the viability of “Queer” as an ontological category, identity, and radical political orientation in an era of digital surveillance and Big Data analytics. Drawing on recent work by Matzner (2016) on the performative dimensions of Big Data, I argue that Big Data’s potential to perform and create Queerness (or its opposites) in the absence of embodiment and intentionality necessitates a rethinking of phenomenological or affective approaches to Queer ontology. Additionally, while Queerness is often theorized as an ongoing process of negotiations, (re)orientations, and iterative becomings, these perspectives presume elements of categorical mobility that Big Data precludes. This paper asks: what happens when our data performs Queerness without our permission or bodily complacency? And can a Queerness that insists on existing in the interstitial margins of categorization, or in the “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, and overlaps” (Sedgwick 1993: 8), endu...

A Queer/ed Archival Methodology: Archival Bodies as Nomadic Subjects

This article highlights the particular—embodied—ways in which the human record can be collected, organized, and preserved. Engaging both archival and queer theories, the understanding of body-as-archives and archives-as-body is instantiated in the oral history record from one genderqueer poet. This poet's narration can be understood as a nomadic one of multiplicities, undoings, and metamorphoses. The far-reaching possibilities of the ongoing histories of the simultaneous becoming and unbecoming – archived (un)becomings – are at play and embodied throughout this archived oral history. The archives can produce a dizzying effect through which, I argue, archivists can resist the urge to settle, to neatly organize, and to contain the archival records to consider new ways to understand and represent the dynamic (un)becomings. Through the interpretive frame of the nomadic, the archives can be understood as a site of (un)becomings and as a space that can hold moving living histories.