Intimate Archives: Interventions on Gender, Sexuality and Intimacies

ABSTRACT Across the Global North and South, there have been exciting engagements with the concept of the archive in recent decades. These debates are of both scholarly and political significance, especially when it comes to contemporary struggles for minority rights, belonging, and recognition. The overlapping fields of gender, sexuality, and queer studies have made major contributions to rethinking the archive - to raise new and important questions about gendered and sexualised intimacies, affect, memory, historical formations, activism and contemporary cultural practice. Contributing to this growing body of work, the present Special Issue: Intimate Archives: Interventions on Gender, Sexuality and Intimacy presents cutting-edge scholarship in African studies - working from various disciplinary standpoints - to occupy, engage and play with the archive as a politically urgent and intellectually productive theme. In this introduction, we underscore how the contributions to the volume mobilise the ‘archive' as more than an institution or a place; it works as an underlying metaphor and a call for thorough contextualisation and a radical re-imagination of the historical experiences - the intimate historicity – of gendered and sexualised lives amidst societal and political change, from colonialism to liberation, from criminalisation of sexual ‘deviance’ to ongoing struggles for visibility and rights not only in Africa but in the broader Global South.