Safeguarding LGBTQ+ Collections: Politics and Practice
01st-02nd February 2024.
The central topic to be explored during the event in February 2024 is the place of institutionalisation in relation to LGBTQ+ material histories. Queer and trans archives have usually begun as personal or community projects, characterised by their independence, informality, and unruliness. LGBTQ+ people have often been sceptical about official archives, libraries, and museums, sometimes with good reason (many official archives, for instance, have displayed a historical propensity to erase the lives of minority identities from view). As individual collections grow, however, maintaining them becomes a challenge. Some queer and trans archives remain fully independent for ethical and political reasons, making a virtue of their lack of institutional affiliation; some become housed within larger libraries and archives, which may allow them to retain their autonomy; still others attain a level of respectability and formality, securing regular funding and maintaining their own premises. Who should be responsible for safeguarding LGBTQ+ collections for posterity, and how should this be done? This event will take the form of a series of conversations, and will include explorations of the variety of materials in LGBTQ+ collections, from art and design artefacts to ephemeral and intangible traces of queer and trans lives.
Day One:
Keynote conversation at the University of St Andrews between Ajamu X, founder of the British Black Queer Archive, and artist Matthew Arthur Williams.
Evening: screening at DCA of The Archivettes (Megan Rossman, 2018), a documentary about the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York, with subsequent discussion between Laura Guy (Glasgow School of Art) and Catherine Spencer (University of St Andrews).
Day Two:
10am-4pm, V&A Dundee
A series of three conversations between archivists, academics, and LGBTQ+ community stakeholders about the politics of queer and trans collections.
Contributors could include: Stef Dickers, Bishopsgate Institute; Orla Egan, Cork LGBT+ Archive; Adele Patrick, Glasgow Women’s Library; Rahul Rao, University of St Andrews; E-J Scott, Museum of Transology; Jamie Valentine, OurStory Scotland.