Queer Archive of Failure

Queer Archive of Failure

Do the archives know that im cute?

Do they know that I smell good

that im listening to charli xcx on repeat

Do they know that im queer too

Can they see me?

Katherine Watson asserts that in the most basic sense, queer theory is about using diverse methods to interrogate “desire and its relationship to identity.”[1] Although queer theory will necessarily evade attempts to summarize or generalize its intentions, the following uses desire as a point of departure to consider queerness and the archive. If the core of queerness is desire, then what is at the core of the desire to find queerness in the archives?[2]

While working on an archival research project in March 2022, I followed this desire and began searching UCLA Library Special Collections for traces of queerness.[3] Searching “trans” or “transgender” primarily conjured records of people described as “transexuals.” “Queer” yielded few search results, including one description of a painting of an oddly shaped piece of fruit.[4] Even amongst earnest attempts to engender hospitality for queer, community archival collections, the odd piece of fruit was a clear reminder of archives’ inability to make a home for queerness. Yet, the realizations, that result from archival injury, never extinguish the desire to return to the archives. In Turning Archival scholars come together to revisit what others deemed the “queer archival turn” in queer studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and history, by examining the “embodied work of turning” and theorize why exactly we cannot resist turning back to the archive.[5] They suggest that the entrance of queer of color, trans, and crip critiques resemble a distinct turning away, that still attends to archive by dismantling its power.[6] The anthology’s editors Zeb Tortorici and Daniel Marshall carefully consider library and information studies, where they see archival theory and praxis “most fully developed,” but without thorough critical engagement.

If I searched sometimes pink makes me sick

or when I hear she, my brain glitches

could I find a queer archive?

My own archival desires were fostered by scholars, at the queer archival turn, dedicated to carving out space for different contributions based on quantifying words like messy, urgent, silly, and unhappy. Reflecting on archival practice and labor now, these words resemble mere reform for me. Similarly, I find practioners concerned with what constitutes a “real archive” or a “real ____ archive” primarily reproducing what they claim to oppose. “Turning” the library catalog into something queer will be insufficient to avoid administrating life chances.[7]

As I keep turning back to archive, I also find myself returning to Jack Judith Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure, which “dismantles the logics” of success, failure, rigor, time, productivity, discipline, order, and positivity while identifying queerness as an inherent failure to perform accepted gender norms and embrace reproductive hetero-temporality.[8] Halberstam accomplishes this in part by deploying humor, low theory, SpongeBob in contrast to Foucault, and in daily life by using two first names. In turn, Halberstam allows us to understand the desire to find queerness in the archive as a pursuit that will necessarily fail and attempts to “queer the archive” as failures. I offer “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming,” unanswered questions, illegibility, and not knowing as essential in developing archival practice and queer, archival orientations away from administrative order or reform.[9] Instead of emphasizing an end product, such as an edited finding aid, the failures or performative attempts that occur along the way are the transformative and generative spaces of queerness. Further, if archivists unsettle the pursuit of futurity in greater alignment with queer theory and focus on what is at work in the present, we can “unleash new forms of memory that relate more to spectrality than to hard evidence, to lost genealogies, than to inheritance, to erasure than to inscription.”[10]

Has anyone tried sitting on a file?

Laying all over it

or bringing it into bed

In the inevitable failures of the archives, the desire for queerness, to see and be seen, can be recognized as the desire for something not yet realized. For people that lead transgressive lives, archivists’ attempts, returns, and activations are a way to continue transforming in their afterlives.

[1] Watson, Katherine. 2005. “Queer Theory.” Group Analysis 38 (1). London: The Group-Analytic Society: 67–81. doi:10.1177/0533316405049369.

[2] As Watson does not include any discussion of the differences between queer theory and the experience of queerness, I use queerness and queer theory interchangeably.

[3] Radical attempts to queer the archive that refuse to use the language of archive at all exist in counter- public spaces and worlds not meant for study.

[4] As a part of an ongoing attempt to repair language, this description is no longer available.

[5]Marshall, Daniel, and Zeb Tortorici. 2022. Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer. Edited by Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici, 1. Durham: Duke University Press.

[6]Marshall, Daniel, and Zeb Tortorici. 2022. Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer. Edited by Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici, 2. Durham: Duke University Press.

[7]Spade, Dean. 2015. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. Durham:Duke University Press.

[8] Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure, 9. Durham: Duke University Press.

[9]Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure, 7. Durham: Duke University Press.

[10]Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure, 15. Durham: Duke University Press.