Brighton and Sussex Sexualities Network

Queer@King's presents...

Sexuality and the Archive: A Colloquium on Method

Friday 18 February 2011, 10am-6pm

This one-day meeting will explore the history of sexuality from the perspective of the archive and archival practice. The archive, whether material or conceptual, is a significant organising framework in historical research, but how have recent efforts to rethink the concept in fields such as philosophy, cultural studies, feminism and queer theory impacted on this scholarship? What forms do archival traces of sexuality take in different periods and cultures? What is it we’re looking for, and how do we know when we’ve found it? What’s the nature of the relationship between the researcher and the archive? What would it mean to 'queer' the archive, or to imagine a queer archive? As well as focusing on the archive as a metaphor and material practice in academic scholarship, the colloquium will also showcase sexuality-related work in galleries, museums, libraries and other public settings.

Topics for discussion include:

• Representation and the politics of cultural visibility/invisibility
• Memory and forgetting
• Affect and 'archives of feeling'
• The archive in contemporary histories of queer intimacy
• Materiality of the archive; artefacts as archives of culture
• Archive trauma, censorship and the destruction of sexual histories
• Questions of interpretation, negotiating relationships between past and present
• Archives and public culture: museums, internet, state versus community-based archives etc
• Locating/accessing sexuality in the archive

Keynote talks by Laura Doan (Manchester, author of Fashioning Sapphism) and Thomas A. Dowson (independent scholar, editor of ‘Queer Archaeologies’ special issue of World Archaeology). Other participants include Laura Gowing (King’s College London), Lesley Hall (Wellcome Library), Amy Mechowski (V&A), Robert Mills (King’s College London), Sally Newman (Monash University/King’s College London), Richard Parkinson (British Museum), Bart Smith (British Library) and Matt Smith (University of Sussex, curator of ‘Queering the Museum’ at Birmingham City Museum).

Sexuality and the Archive is particularly targeted at graduate students and early career researchers working on the history of sexuality (broadly defined) across a range of periods and academic disciplines. FREE AND ALL WELCOME BUT ADVANCED REGISTRATION IS NECESSARY. To register please contact queer@kcl.ac.uk with affiliation and contact details.

www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/hrc/queer/current/

Organised by Sally Newman and Robert Mills on behalf of Queer@King's.