Queer(ing) Archives: Alternative Intimacies, Histories, and Subjectivities

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel seeks to explore the intimacies, histories, and subjectivities that make up Russian and Polish queer archives and to theorize how these texts inspire more nuanced understandings of gender and sexuality. We take the archive to be not merely a repository of the past nor an assemblage of fragments, but an epistemological mode. Across cultural and historical contexts, from imperial Russian medicine to late Soviet samizdat to the Polish Solidarity Movement, this panel probes the queer undergrounds that have long been erased from national canons. We also attune to the shadows within queer archives, particularly the omission of trans voices, and approach these erasures as symptomatic of the violent contradictions between normative narratives and personal memories. Our panelists traverse a range of genres blending fact and fiction––from historically-inspired plays and essays to autobiographical visual texts and medical case studies. They consider the multiplicitous subjectivities held under the umbrella of queerness, including FTM and MTF trans embodiments and clandestine female desire. A central question binding these four papers is: What new affective landscapes, ontologies, epistemologies, and genealogies emerge through queer(ing) archives? Inspired by Derrida’s proposal that the archive is “a question of the future,” our panel centers overlooked queer stories and engages the archive as a catalyst for speculating the queer futures that are not yet here.

Sub Unit

• Gender/LGBTQ Studies

Chair

• Randall James Rowe, U of Cincinnati

Papers

• Narrating ‘Sexual Inversion’: The Case of Patient N* in Ippolit Tarnovskii’s 'Sexual Inversion among Women' - LeiAnna X Hamel, Smith College

• Between Silence and Embodiment: Queer Strategies of Memory in Olga Sedakova's 'In Memory of a Heroine' - Elizaveta Grishechkina, U of Pittsburgh

• From Solidarity to Foreign Bodies: Ewa Hołuszko and the Polish Trans Archive - Marta Lasota, Northwestern U

• Don’t Just Read, Look!: Visual Text in Yevgeny Kharitonov’s 'The Novel' - Angel Estevez, Northwestern U

Discussant

• Brian James Baer, Kent State U