Towards Queer Counterpublics. Semi-Peripheral Archive Theory after the “Archival Turn”

For this session of the working group Semi-Peripheral Theory | Tendencies of Contemporary Theory Production in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, our guest will be Ewa Majewska.

In the last years, Ewa Majewska has been investigating the archives of a police operation targeting gay men in 1980s Poland, codename “Hiacynt.” The operation was never announced publicly, and thus the targeted queer person experienced it as particularly invasive. This secrecy is still today used as a convenient excuse against making the police archives accessible to scholars and the wider public, thus raising important questions about the police and secret police archives, the public and queering the archives as a strategy.

In queer archive studies, largely inspired by the Derridean “archival turn” of the late 1990s and prominently expanded by such authors as Michael Warner, Ann Cvetkovich and Jack Halberstam, we now begin to ask questions concerning the public archive and the necessity of bringing queer studies strategies as well as LGBTQIA+ lives to the center of public attention. In the time of anti-gender wars, the necessity of not only preserving queer lives, but also of queering their public archives and visibility seems no less important than the demand to build independent LGBTQIA+ archives worldwide. It is thus crucial to discuss queer counterpublics as perhaps best suited to transversally (Guattari, 1990) build a heterogeneous, welcoming, but also critical strategy for queer archives not only to survive, but also to push forward LGBTQIA+ rights and visibility. In such moments, we need to oppose neoliberal principles of productivity and success, so broadly shaping lives in semi-peripheries in particular, and approach the archive with knowledge and strategies shaped in the sense of powerlessness (Havel, 1978) or “weak affects” (Kosofsky-Sedgwick, 2003), knowing the “failures” (Halberstam, 2011) but also the “utopia” (Muñoz, 2010) of queerness. Perhaps this can be expanded to the complex domains of the public archives more broadly, and—joining forces with feminist (Nochlin, 1971) and plebeian (Zinn, 1978) strategies for the archive—make change more pertinent and diverse?

If you would like to attend, please send a note to theorycese@zfl-berlin.org.

Fig. above: © Moritz Gansen