Undisciplined Objects: Queer Women's Archives

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This essay reflects on the seeming impossibility of Global South area studies in its intersection with gender/queer studies geographically and epistemologically based in the North from the vantage point of queer archives and the study of queer networks of women writers, artists, and intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century. It suggests that the process of gathering and theorizing an unstable, transnational, largely Latin American queer archive that resists full legibility becomes an opportunity to think about the geopolitics of knowledge, methodologies, disciplines, and activism. Queer Latin American archives, when approached from situated decolonial, feminist, and queer theories and methodologies, offer an encounter with the radical illegibility of queer desire, bodies, ways of living, eroticism, and relationships. The voices and embodiments in these archives contribute to the history of non-heteronormative imaginations and to the genealogies of sexual and gender dissidence essential to queer theories and histories in the Global South.