Closet Cases: Queer Archives and the Politics of Representation
Archives have existed since the advent of history, but always in a decidedly fractured fashion. It might be argued that the archive, by its very nature, is a study in and of fragmentation: it is systematically organized piece-by-piece, and attempts to construct a whole — a coherent narrative or collection of information — through those pieces. Often, the archive is conceptualized and configured as a static entity. It is presented as a receptacle, waiting passively, for the accumulation of more material to fill its reaches or a researcher to sift through its contents and present a new critique or insight. I argue that the archive is neither passive nor static; in fact, its very existence can be a political act. In the context of marginalized perspectives and communities — that of queer people, people of color, colonized nations, to name a few — archives serve as a necessary antidote to the victor-written histories taught in school curricula and seemingly indelibly stored in the popular imagination.
More recently, the potential of archives to address and rectify historical oversights has been harnessed from a variety of directions and levels. DIY Wikipedia edit-a-thons are held frequently, including on the Berkeley campus, to expand the record of historical contributions to the world by women, people of color, and other marginalized groups. Institutionally, organized attempts to improve the diversity of digital and material collections has been undertaken, though restricted by access to and availability of material for collections, the amount of grant funding secured to accomplish projects, and the constraints set by more conservative boards or donors. Community archives, a stated alternative to the institutional status quo, continue to expand in mission, scope, and approach to accommodate new ideas of what archives can be and who they should serve. Even experimental art has gotten involved, questioning the very purpose and definition of the archive and how it may be exploited for other uses.
The reason I was inspired to write about the political (and activist) potential of archives — with a focus on queer collections — is twofold. After interning at the Smithsonian and talking to an archivist with a concentration in queer historical figures and movements, I was interested in the past of such a discipline and the potential directions I could move in my own career, with a personal interest in similar subjects. Additionally, as a queer person myself, I find — albeit critically — the historicization and preservation of queer-associated events and ephemera necessary and significant to engage younger generations (myself included) in a clear and personal understanding of what it means to be part of the queer community. More importantly, the meanings and methods of curation and preservation must be recognized as politically motivated, and in that way influenced by particular discourses, cultural norms, and societal dictates. A history which is (and, historically has been) censored, collected, or written to reflect only a particular point of view is of no use. Danbolt (2009, 30) writes that archives exist, inherently, through and because of exclusion, and may be seen as a form of violence against the communities and histories they work to omit.
Queer collections have the potential — as part of a larger umbrella of unrepresented or marginalized histories, and under the schema of queer theory, which works to problematize normative assumptions of many facets of life — to critique and change the praxis of archives, and perhaps even liberate them from their institutionalizing or exclusionary frameworks. Further, we might use queer archives as a model for queering archives generally, that is, to disrupt and rework their very nature. Though I was not able to conduct fieldwork for this particular paper, I would like to draw from the scholarship I have engaged with about archives and activist practice, conversations with various individuals involved in archival sites (academically affiliated and not), and — relying on the classical feminist tenet that the personal is political — my own experiences with archives, as user and curator, to think about their relationship to and implications for activism. This exploration is guided by the conceptualization of archives as three distinct, yet unified ideas: archives as physical spaces which house collections, or repositories; archives as the personal accumulation of ephemera, both tangible and immaterial; and archives as absences or silences to be addressed or reimagined.
Archives as physical designations for records and historical materials have been defined in oppositional terms: they are institutionalized (and institutionalizing) sites, or they are community-driven alternatives created to rectify the oversights of the former. "Traditional" archives, what Edenheim (2014) refers to as "public research archives," are bound by inscribed methodological parameters and the key interests of the institutions they represent; in short, they are beholden to bureaucracy, which inhibits their potential to change and grow as rapidly as the world around them. The explicit ties to institutions in archives historically means that the understanding of what their collections can and should contain is limited. This is starting to change, however, as social tides and academic discourse have shifted. It still warrants a closer examination, especially in the context of potentially activist acts or frameworks. Institutions ranging from universities to governmental collections have begun to incorporate more explicitly queer material within their scope; the aforementioned archivist at the Smithsonian was working on the donated papers of Matthew Shepard's family when I met him, and the Bancroft Library houses two volumes of the Oscar Wilde queer-theme co-op's house journals that I perused when researching the Berkeley cooperative housing system. But simple efforts to improve inclusion or representation do not solve underlying methodological and conceptual problems, especially when these processes are conducted without ample communication and collaboration with the communities they represent. Even an uptick in circulation or access to new materials does not inherently signify progress, as flows of information can be transient (Danbolt 2010, 100) and do not equate to acts of long-term remembrance or a stake in the public consciousness.
The "archival turn," as argued by Ann Cvetkovich in a roundtable discussion with Anjali Arondekar et al. (2015, 228), requires a complete rethinking of what constitutes archival knowledge and methodology. It is worth noting at this juncture, however, that community archives have had to resituate their expectations and practices from the normative archival model as a necessity from the outset. This typically involves taking a "radical" approach to scope and operations, such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives' unrestricted access policy to self-identified lesbians, the collections of the Leather Archives and Museum, or the specialized catalog classification system for the materials in Sacramento's Lavender Library, Archives, and Cultural Exchange (Wakimoto, Hansen, and Bruce 2013, 448). These practices emerge from a community-perceived need to express cultural heritage (Kirste 2007: 135), with caveats of limited budgets, resources, space, and staff. Creativity is required in order to best express the purpose and significance of collections as well as ensure the continued operations of the facilities.
The increased questioning and imagining of new structures and potentialities which alter the understanding and writing of history beyond the material or conceptual boundaries of traditional archives also has implications for their contemporary relevance and particularly of accessioning and preservation. In more modern history, the development and presence of digital collections has done much to deregulate the content of archives as well as democratize their availability to various publics. Hogan (2008), in articulating a lesbian podcast as holding an archival function, also argues that digital methods create more opportunities for direct participation and challenge time and place as discrete markers of identity (199). Indeed, online and digitized collections are often romanticized as solving the typical issues of accumulating material collections: the massive physical space they take up, the controlled conditions they must be held in, and the inevitable disintegration they incur regardless of maintenance and "best practices". By being tethered online as opposed to a physical repository, items in a digital archive may be more easily accessed and exploited for activist uses; they can be cross-referenced quickly, serve as evidence for various testimonials or refutations of claims and acts, and create or shift public awareness and discourse about the material aspects or traces of political movements, identity, and historical representation.
At the same time, digitization — while admirable in its implications for user access and diversification — is not a unilateral solution. The proliferation of digital technology is a response to increasing demand by consumers; and as digitization procedures become less cost-prohibitive, they are able to be replicated in a variety of archival configurations and sites. There are pragmatic archival considerations in the midst of rapid digitization projects, especially for smaller sites with lower budgets and fewer resources, including determining disaster and recovery plans; acknowledging the fact that not everything can be digitized and does not stand in for or replicate the original, material thing (even in material archival collections, such as the photographic archive, its components are subjects to only the characters or qualities that are photographable (Sekula 1986, 70); and limiting the human burden of large-scale digitization campaigns (Sheffield and Zieman 2011, 114-115). Much like the increasing "inclusion" and accumulation of queer and marginalized histories in archives and special collections, rampant races to complete digitization projects skirt the larger questions and criticisms of institutional practices in favor of the trendy or cutting edge. The consequences of these efforts can be beneficial for the public, and for the continual representation of alternate histories and perspectives, but are ultimately still at the whim and constraints of traditional standards and methodologies. Keeping up progressive appearances and asserting bureaucratic and social relevance is what is at stake in these decisions, at least more so than challenging the confines which dictate exclusion in the first place.
Queer archives, and community archives generally, are arguably more welcoming of alternate modes, displays, and understandings of collecting, preserving, and categorizing than codified institutional archives. Historically, queer collections have comprised largely of ephemera, including posters, newsletters, and photographs, which can be more difficult to classify and "read" than legal documents or personal papers (Luciano 2011, 124). Moreover, they engender an understanding of archival potential (in particular, its relation to the strictly immaterial) that is usually missing from more traditional models. This is most popularly expressed by Cvetkovich as an archive of feelings: that which engages in intimate and experiential queer histories through the incorporation of "non-archival" material, especially ephemera (Cvetkovich 2003: 112). Also within the scope of a queer or queered archive is the living, the mundane: both as an extension of oral history through personal testimonials (Ramirez 2005) and the collected evidence of everyday domestic histories (Scheffield 2014). Eliminating the unrealistic, impossible expectation of "objectivity" in the accumulation of the archival, besides better reflecting the construction of history and how it is compiled, undermines the apparently indelible power of these sources, and with it the power of those who write, intervene in, and protect them.
The work and research I have conducted while attending Berkeley about the Albany Bulb has allowed me to ponder the divide of material and immaterial more personally and experientially — a sustained engagement with "embodied practices" (Marshall, Murphy, and Tortorici 2015, 2) and the affective potential of archival work, both in the context of cataloguing and preservation and analysis and display. As an apprentice on this project, I have edited the metadata of photographs taken during the surface excavation of the Albany Bulb post-resident eviction and helped construct a hierarchy of content and terms to describe what is pictured. While this falls into a fairly standard methodology of cataloguing and digital archival practice, the content of the archive — the archaeological remains of a contemporary homeless camp — and the ways in which the metadata were classified (in contexts of archaeological terminology, how the residents described their accommodations, or "home," and profitable real estate features) subverts normative, "objective" standards for classification and critiques, implicitly, the ways in which those categories privilege certain perspectives and ideas in the historical record.
The eventual display of this material, which manifested as a combination of material and digital forms (canvas and tarp excavation maps of residential sites, an online photo database, and a portfolio of ephemera collected at the site and contributed by community members) better articulates the diversity of knowledge production and dissemination within the community represented and their modes and methods of self-definition and preservation. It also encompasses the immaterial: it acknowledges the significance of the physical site as it relates to the content, as well as the digital replicates constructed as analogs, but ultimately rejects the reading of these strategies as strictly dichotomous. Queer archives generally, with connections to violent or survivalist histories, may be better equipped to serve as models for alternate community histories. In this example, the Bulb archive might be seen as "queering" the archive (Morris 2006, 147), as it creates a new rhetoric that better frames the particular scholarship, pedagogy, and, indeed, activist impetus of in the information brought forward and connected through archival work.
Dave, in her work on lesbian and queer women's community activism in India, describes activism as including practices of reflection and intimate relationality (Cohen 2019). Muñoz and Cvetkovich closely parallel this argument within archival contexts as they iterate the importance of queer contexts and content to push forward the significance of affect, emotion, and "possibility, a sense of self-knowing, a mode of sociality and relationality" (Muñoz 1996: 6). Disidentification and reframing as strategies for intervention in contested spaces also require a bodily approach that is attentive to the multiplicity of lived experience that is or can be represented in the archive (Lee 2017: 19). The pushback in both archival contexts and Dave's work is the manifestation and outcomes of presenting and working through lived experience: the particular language used to describe and frame the self can result in a unified community movement or a fractured display of personal engagement with the larger world. Archival activism thus requires a common understanding of the possibility of disparity, complexity, and duality, and must work to formulate a practice that encompasses, rather than excludes, these potentialities.
Archives can speak as much in their absences as they can in the diversity and specificity of their holdings. It makes sense, then, that a queer academic discourse which has often drawn results from reimaginations, transformations, becomings, unravelings, and utopias projects a similar image onto archives and their queer potential. Cheryl Dunye's film The Watermelon Woman creates a fictional or "imaginary" archive in order to both illustrate the difficulty of finding tangible queer history in traditional resources and imagine past and future queer lives; in conversation with Dunye, Bryan-Wilson postulates that the real silence of archives is their queerest element (Bryan-Wilson 2013, 83). Arguably, the pluralization of experiential modes such as Dunye's film mirrors the pluralities of queer existence which continually evade widespread recognition and inclusion; they also serve — I argue — as activist attempts to rectify these gaps in knowledge and representation without being subsumed into a typical schema that would mistranslate or ignore the nuances embedded within.
Carland and Cvetkovich (2013), similarly, suggest the invented archive as an alternative or companion to the challenges inherent in the absent archive (74). The goal of queer archives in their conversation is largely the acknowledgement of absent histories and the recovery of existing, "hidden" or censored content. The telos of reconceptualization and redefinition of archival sites and meanings is not fundamentally or solely a self-determined and expanded "representation" or "inclusion," but a transformation (Arondekar et al. 2015, 222). A physical and conceptual transformation of the archive (as a site and a figuration) requires bodily engagement with both the material and the theoretical; a performativity that acknowledges both the value of the material and the cataloguing processes which work to archive that material (Cvetkovich 2011: 34). Archives themselves are "haunted" by bodily enactment — biopolitical strategies which discipline and manage how bodies move through space in society also impact the ways these bodies are presented in historical literature, discourse, and primary material (Lee 2016) — and the ghosts which linger in these spaces may be conjured up or out through alternate strategies and modes of thinking.
It is evident from existing scholarship that much like in traditional or public research archives, there is no unilateral solution that will accommodate the particular needs and complexities of a queer archive; in fact, there is not even necessarily common agreement about what a "queer archive" is or should look like. Perspectives in what steps to take to rectify exclusion in archives and expand their accessibility and relevance include interventions designed to minimize ties to academic scholarship (Sheffield 2014: 110); using queer methodologies that incorporate epistemological and world-making processes (Lee 2016) to transform the archive's function as a social project and facilitator for storytelling (Hogan 2008: 199); and integrating the focus of feelings and experiences in queer theoretical models with the traditional and institutional features of archives (Edenheim 2014: 44). The activist impulse in all of this theory is how change and transformation is approached — how various nodes among networks define and delineate between practices, and in doing so determine (if unconsciously) their purpose and intentions in creating and maintaining archival sites. Crichton (2013) states simply that queer people wander (51). Queering the archive necessitates an exploration in constructing, disrupting, and rearranging timelines; there is a requirement and an expectation of movement, flexibility, fluidity. To progress, unbecome, hybridize, and reflect varied potential, archives must serve as studies in multiplicity. They are simultaneously inclusive access points to the everyday of the past, models for exclusion, meticulously preserved but inevitably disintegrating, static receptacles that are constantly in flux. Archives themselves are like activism in that they draw from what has happened and exist for the extrapolation of new imaginings; their queered potential is latent.
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