“It’s Hard to See Yourself as a Historical Subject”: Collaging and Queer Archiving

• In Event: Politics and Possibilities of Collage as Archive: Centering Anticolonial Methods

Abstract

Ways of living and relating that are currently described as queer and/or trans have long posed threats to the state. As such, states have long been engaged in active attempts to erase queer and trans life from public life. Part of these efforts is the silencing of queer and trans archival presence, both in (lack of or selective) presence of queer and trans life in state valued institutions as well as the destruction of archives created and held within queer and trans communities. All the while, queer and trans communities creatively document intimate traces of everyday encounters and collective efforts.

QTthreads is a social design experiment (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016) with commitments from participatory design research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) with a queer approach (McWilliams, 2016). A shifting intergenerational group of 20 participants gathered for 3-hour sessions on Sunday afternoons from November 2023-July 2024. Participating in QTthreads did not require explicitly identifying as LGBTQ+; program design is rooted in a pedagogy of trans desire (Slovin, 2024) and people enacted dynamic forms of identification and positioning. We regularly engaged with archives to root our activities in ongoing struggles, with a commitment toward participants’ development as historical actors (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016; Lizárraga, 2023). I regularly invited the group to consider contributing to archives. Participants worked to negotiate tensions between appreciating seeing and forming connections with queer and trans histories, struggles, and peoples, whose experiences animate the archives we visited, while also being uncertain about contributing to archives (Table. 1). As Ash put it, “you never know what’s gonna be interesting to people in the future” and, as Tess put it, “it’s hard to see yourself as a historical subject”. Following queer South Asian Muslim archivist Mustafa Saifuddin (2020), we were interested in “how the archive can make room for an intimate exchange of stories without giving away all of our secrets”.

[Table 1]

The research, however, creates an archive. I approached analysis with a multi-sited ethnographic sensibility (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014), adapting microanalytic methods from Vossoughi et al. (2020)’s study of relational histories to create analytic drawings and animations of unfolding activity. I layered these drawings with related data (e.g. interview excerpts, program artifacts, archival materials, additional drawings, etc.) to create multimedia collages as queer methodology (Ball, 2021). This process offered an additional layer of participant anonymity, especially at a time of heightened violence toward queer and trans folks and those who join in nourishing conditions for our flourishing (Cruz, 2020). I offer this multimodal methodology, informed by trans studies (e.g. Vaccaro, 2014; Galarte, 2015), as one way I’ve sought to grapple with the vital question “how can education researchers design methodologies that avoid reinforcing the structures and epistemologies that have done harm to trans people?” (Keenan, 2022, p. 307). In the workshop I offer ethical and political tensions and possibilities that emerged through this project broadly and that I sought to explicitly engage in the collage-making process.

Author

• Ali R. Blake, School of the Art Institute of Chicago