Accessing Transgender // Desiring Queer(er?) Archival Logics

Radical History Review, 2014

This is the introduction to the first of two issues of Radical History Review (#120) on "Queering Archives"

Research in the Archival Multiverse, 2015

In this chapter, I critically consider the ways that heteronormativity, homonormativity, and the politics of respectability come together to both haunt and produce the digital narratives that constitute the Arizona Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Storytelling Project, in order to discover how memories are sometimes disciplined to re-produce normative narratives about queer pasts. I look and listen for the queering potentials in shared stories and in the digital and participatory technologies that record them. While conversations about “queering the archive” are not new and are, in fact, taking place transnationally, these conversations are extended here to explore the ways in which conformity to archival norms can be treacherous. I ask whether an archive can be a space of radical intervention or if it must always and only be a repository for stories that reproduce normative iterations of histories that inform powerful and normativizing national imaginaries. For those of us committed to intervening in traditional archival constructs and related practices of collecting and documenting, we can see that such practices run the risk of reproducing sexual normativities and social divisions.We should, therefore, understand the queer/ed archive as always in motion—forming and re-forming itself as we constitute and re-member its collections. Ultimately, this chapter argues for the need to develop a Queer/ed Archival Methodology, Q/M, to help ensure that complex, non-normative, and even contradictory histories have their places in society’s record.

SUNY Press eBooks, 2015

Out of the closet, into the archives : researching sexual histories / edited by Amy L. Stone and Jaime Cantrell. pages cm. -(SUNY series in queer politics and cultures) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-5903-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4384-5905-9 (e-book) 1. Gay and lesbian studies. 2. Gays-Research.

This article highlights the particular—embodied—ways in which the human record can be collected, organized, and preserved. Engaging both archival and queer theories, the understanding of body-as-archives and archives-as-body is instantiated in the oral history record from one genderqueer poet. This poet's narration can be understood as a nomadic one of multiplicities, undoings, and metamorphoses. The far-reaching possibilities of the ongoing histories of the simultaneous becoming and unbecoming – archived (un)becomings – are at play and embodied throughout this archived oral history. The archives can produce a dizzying effect through which, I argue, archivists can resist the urge to settle, to neatly organize, and to contain the archival records to consider new ways to understand and represent the dynamic (un)becomings. Through the interpretive frame of the nomadic, the archives can be understood as a site of (un)becomings and as a space that can hold moving living histories.

The Writing Instructor, 2015

I describe an encounter with artifacts as they come to life for me in a moment of archival serendipity.

Surveillance & Society, 2019

This paper critically interrogates the viability of “Queer” as an ontological category, identity, and radical political orientation in an era of digital surveillance and Big Data analytics. Drawing on recent work by Matzner (2016) on the performative dimensions of Big Data, I argue that Big Data’s potential to perform and create Queerness (or its opposites) in the absence of embodiment and intentionality necessitates a rethinking of phenomenological or affective approaches to Queer ontology. Additionally, while Queerness is often theorized as an ongoing process of negotiations, (re)orientations, and iterative becomings, these perspectives presume elements of categorical mobility that Big Data precludes. This paper asks: what happens when our data performs Queerness without our permission or bodily complacency? And can a Queerness that insists on existing in the interstitial margins of categorization, or in the “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, and overlaps” (Sedgwick 1993: 8), endu...

The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric, 2022

fethaps unsurprisingly, the emergent work in transgender rhetorics has been carefully attuned a:,nsiderations of who gets to speak and under what conditions. In their introduction to a :i.tl issue of Peitho focused on "Transgender Rhetorics," GPat Patterson makes a compelling for the viability of this area of study, noting that "trans people are crafting arguments that, '3uite frankly, need listened to, because cis culture's profound lack of imagination about the ways :,ender is weaponized and racialized doesn't just result in terrible arguments-it results in danger, precarity, and soul murder for gender-expansive people" (Patterson). The creation of archives is ouc,Jj>edfic way to support trans people's stories being heard and treated with the respect and care they deserve; given the stakes that Patterson elucidates, the exigence for this work could not be J11y clearer. This is a well-worn path for many subfields in rhetorical studies, where the process of building an ma of study often includes what Royster and Kirsch, in discussing feminist rhetoric, refer to as the "three R's": "rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription" (14). The development of trans-specific archival collections can be used to support "rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription" as they allow for new and dC:l'_Per considerations of trans rhetorical practices that have been developed and enacted by trans