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D.C. Queer Studies 2011: Queering the Archive/Archiving the Queer

The 2011 lecture series highlighted that the archives of queer intimacies and subjectivities are everywhere and nowhere – in audio recordings, the chronicles of colonialism, the records of psychiatric hospitals and prisons, the ephemera collected by LGBT community history organizations.

Event Details

For the scholar of sex and gender variation, the encounter with the archive is often a matter of attending to patterns of silence and submersion, of reading evidence that is always under erasure. To queer the archive is to tease out those buried truths, but it is also to recognize the vexed nature of “truth” and to acknowledge that one’s own desires and fantasies shape and misshape what one sees in any collection of artifacts or records. In this fascinating series of lectures and conversations, scholars and producers of queer archives reflected on what they do, why they do it, and what is at stake in efforts to document queer identities, practices, and performances. Speakers led us in an expedition of the depths of a history that is no longer hidden but not yet fully in view.

Events Included:

  • Ann Cvetkovich, “Queer Ephemerality and the Counterarchives”
  • Selly k. Thiam, “None on Record: Stores of Queer Africa”
  • Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, “‘To Create Beyond Need’: Black Feminism, Caribbean (Trans)gender, and the Work of the Imagination”
  • Regina Kunzel, “In Treatment: The Queer Archive of Mid-20th-Century Psychiatry”

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