Version 2 2024-06-13, 09:21Version 2 2024-06-13, 09:21
Version 1 2015-08-24, 14:41Version 1 2015-08-24, 14:41
journal contribution
posted on 2024-06-13, 09:21authored byD Marshall, KP Murphy, Z Tortorici
In the longer introduction of Radical History Review’s two thematic issues “Queering Archives,” we frame the archive as an evasive and dynamic space animated by the tensions of knowledge production, absence, and presence. As Jeffrey Weeks argued in RHR in 1979, “The evolution of sexual meanings and identities that we have traced over the past hundred years or so are by no means complete.”1 Fragments of information float unfixed — historically unraveled — and we form archives when we pull the fragments into the orbit of efforts to know. Yet the business of knowing is unsteady, as scholars of sexuality and gender have amply demonstrated. Between the fraught and necessary practices of historicization, anachronism, interpretation, bias, and partial readings that propel historical scholarship, archival fragments fall in and out of the frame of an easily perceptible knowledge. Queer historical knowledge thus is evasive — like a coin dropped in the ocean and for which one grasps, reaching it only for it to slip away again, rolling deeper into the beyond. To say that the knowledge work of animating queer historical fragments is marked by such slipperiness is to underline how the archive negotiates the decomposition and recomposition of knowledge’s materials. We pull and push at the fading paper, the fraying fabric, the photographs bleaching into their backgrounds, and manipulate technologies on their way to obsolescence, all as part of some suturing effort of one kind or another.