Queer Adventures in the Forum and the Archive: Or,the Flood Made Immersion Possible

Abstract

Inspired by the Queer Archival Immersion Seminar at the Kinsey Institute during the 2017 Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) Summer Institute, this article engages the queerness of archival research to illustrate how the productive tension between the delight of discovery and the discomfort of anxiety and inadequacy emerges from the process of research and archival immersion. Combining archival field methods and autoethnographic reflection, I ask how cohabitation and a collective dwelling in the archive compelled my body to feel both delight and anxiety. This story aims to illustrate how the relational experience of archival research contains within it the capacity to queer the processes of research and knowledge production. To animate this claim, I narrate how my body in the archive both resists and complies with the call of the objects in front of me. This is the story of being in the Kinsey with fellow archival queers and explores how that being with facilitates embodied lines of inquiry and potential moments of queer worldmaking for our objects of desire and research.

Keywords

queer theory autoethnography writing as method of inquiry

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