Stirring Queer and Trans Memory: Counterarchives and Peripheries

Location: Centre Cultural La Nau, C/ de la Universitat, 2. 46003 Valencia, Spain

A pdf of this call for papers can be found here!

The PERCOL conference ‘Stirring Queer and Trans Memory’ intends to explore counter-archival queer theories and practices as they rise from, and apply to, peripheral locations and experiences. Because of their oblique relationship to official history and their experience of suppression and erasure—and of joyous survival and resistance—LGTBIQ+ communities have long had an affinity with counter-archives: alternative repositories, imaginatively conceived and run, that have sought to counter the various epistemic violences—colonial, cisgender, heteronormative—that subtend standard histories. Counterarchives have brought into play, more or less consciously, queer understandings of non-linear time; have valued the ephemeral, affective and immaterial; and have generated strategies of opacity and illegibility in the development of an emancipatory archival practice.

They have also fostered decentralized, horizontal, open, flexible preservation strategies, while remaining sensitive to the silences of history and to the precariousness of queer memory and its traces. However, numerous queer and trans archives created in the last few decades have reproduced, often partially and unwittingly, many of the hierarchical binarisms (north / south; centre / periphery) that privilege urban, rather than non-urban lives and experiences and queer and trans white people over ethnic and racialized communities, migrants, sex workers, and the dwellers of the south-within-the-south. In order to redress such biases, ‘Stirring Queer and Trans Memory’ seeks to explore the counterarchives and counterarchival strategies that rise from methodological, historical, geographical, social, and identitary peripheries, as well as from border areas, contact zones, porous sites, and other liminal territories.

Proposals may address—without being limited to—the following topics:

• Archival heterodoxies and queer and trans lives
• Counterarchives, race, and ethnicity
• Migrant counterarchives
• Counterarchives and geographical peripheries
• Counterarchives and the rural
• Archives and territory: mapping against the grain
• Counterarchives and multiple peripheries
• Nomadic archives
• The artistic activation of counter archives
• Artistic practice as / and counterarchives
• Archival experience and monster institutions
• Archiving archival resistance
• Counterarchives and the (il)legible
• The affects of the counterarchive
• The materiality of the counterarchive
• Sound counterarchives
• Digital counterarchives
• The counterarchive and the limits of the archivable

Proposals of around 300 words and brief bios of around 100 words should be sent to: [email protected]. The deadline for the reception of proposals is December 15, 2024. Acceptances will be sent out during the first week of January, 2025.