Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies

by Daniel Marshall (Editor), Zeb Tortorici (Editor)

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. The contributors examine such topics as the everyday life of marginalized queer immigrants in New York City as an archive; secondhand 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 Fernández-Galeano, Emmett Harsin Drager, Elliot James, Marget Long, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Daniel Marshall, María Elena Martínez, Joan Nestle, Iván Ramos, David Serlin, Zeb Tortorici

Genres: Queer

379 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 6, 2022

About the author

Daniel Marshall is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University, Melbourne.

Reviews

[Iñaki Tofiño · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mixed feelings about it. As it often happens in editions with multiple authors, some articles were really interesting (María Elena Martínez and Zeb Tortorici on the archival life of Juana Aguilar, Elliot James on Afrika), other were very surprising (Javier Fernández Galeano on reading out loud files in Argentinian archives), and others were completely pointless or really bad.