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
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: (Re)Turning to the Queer Archives / Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici 1
1. Archives, Bodies, and Imagination: The Case of Juana Aguilar and Queer Approaches to History, Sexuality, and Politics / MarÍa Elena MartÍnez 33
2. Decolonial Archival Imaginaries: On Losing, Performing, and Finding Juana Aguilar / Zeb Tortorici 63
3. Telling Tales: Sexuality, Archives, South Asia / Anjali Arondekar 93
4. Ordinary Lesbians and Special Collections: The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives at UCLA / Ann Cvetkovich 111
5. Performing Queer Archives: Argentine and Spanish Policing Files for Unintended Audiences (1950s–1970s) / Javier FernÁndez-Galeano 141
6. Looking after Mrs. G: Approaches and Methods for Reading Transsexual Clinical Case Files / Emmett Harsin Drager 165
7. Naming Afrika’s Archive “Queer Pan-Africanism” / Elliott James 185
8. Secondhand Cultures, Ephemeral Erotics, and Queer Reproduction: Notes on Collecting David Bowie Records / Daniel Marshall 203
9. Pirates and Punks: Booklegs, Archives, and Performance in Mexico City / IvÁn A. Ramos 233
10. Unfixed: Materializing Disability and Queerness in Three Objects / Kate Clark and David Serlin 259
11. An Archival Life: Unsettling Queer Immigrant Dwellings / Martin F. Manalansan IV 285
12. Reassessing “The Archive” in Queer Theory / Kate Eichhorn 303
13. Crocker Land: A Mirage in the Archive / Carolyn Dinshaw and Marget Long 321
Coda: Who Were We to Do Such a Thing? Grassroots Necessities, Grassroots Dreaming: The LHA in its Early Years / Joan Nestle 347
Contributors 359
Index 365
