Queering Archives: Intimate Tracings

“Queering Archives: Intimate Tracings” is the second of two themed issues from Radical History Review (numbers 120 and 122) that explore the ways in which the notion of the “queer archive” is increasingly crucial for scholars working at the intersection of history, sexuality, and gender. Efforts to record and preserve queer experiences determine how scholars account for the past and provide a framework for understanding contemporary queer life. Essays in these issues consider historical materials from queer archives around the world as well as the recent critical practice of “queering” the archive by looking at historical collections for queer content (and its absence).

This issue considers how archives allow historical traces of sexuality and gender to be sought, identified, recorded, and assembled into accumulations of meaning. Contributors explore conundrums in contemporary queer archival methods, probing some of them in essays on the Catholic Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This issue also includes a series of intergenerational interviews reflecting on histories of LGBT archives, a roundtable discussion about legacies of queer studies of the archive, and a closing reflection by Joan Nestle, a founding figure in the practice of international queer archiving.

Daniel Marshall is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University, Melbourne. Kevin P. Murphy is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota and a member of the Radical History Review editorial collective. Zeb Tortorici is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University.

Contributors: Rustem Ertug Altinay, Anjali Arondekar, Elspeth H. Brown, Elise Chenier, Howard Chiang, Ben Cowan, Ann Cvetkovich, Sara Davidmann, Leah DeVun, Peter Edelberg, Licia Fiol-Matta, Jack Jen Gieseking, Christina Hanhardt, Robb Hernandez, Kwame Holmes, Regina Kunzel, A. J. Lewis, Martin F. Manalansan IV, MarÍa Elena MartÍnez, Michael Jay McClure, Caitlin McKinney, Katherine Mohrman, Joan Nestle, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Tavia Nyong’o, Anthony M. Petro, K. J. Rawson, Barry Reay, Juana MarÍa RodrÍguez, Don Romesburg, Rebecka Sheffield, Marc Stein, Margaret Stone, Susan Stryker, Robert Summers, Jeanne Vaccaro, Dale Washkansky, Melissa White