ABSTRACT

Discussions of the purpose and value of lesbian and gay archives, and more abstract speculations on the meanings of the ‘queer archive’ emerge in the shadow of those influential musings on the archive conducted by Foucault (in, for example, The Order of Things) and Derrida (in, for example, Archive Fever). The archive has become, consequently, less a place, more ‘a way of seeing, or a way of knowing; [….] a symbol or form of power’. 1 Whether this makes the idea of the archive ripe for queer appropriation or irrevocably tainted by its association with authority, institutionalisation, and regulation is the question underlying what follows. Can we so easily dismiss the archive’s etymological echoes of, in Derrida’s words, ‘the commencement and the commandment’ of the law in our formulation of a queer archive? 2 For Foucault, the archive does not merely memorise events or practices but determines what can be said and thought. 3 The consequent realisation of the ambiguous and contradictory nature and effects of the queer archive are evident in representations of archives and libraries found in several contemporary gay and lesbian fictions. Such fictions evince a more ambivalent attitude towards the archiving of material relating to sexuality, towards recordkeeping and public cultures organised around sexuality, and towards the very idea of the ‘archive’ and its connotations than much recent queer theoretical writing. In the literary instances that follow, I adduce the knowledge that the archive protects and produces is both enlightening and—to some extent—restrictive, regulative, and even coercive.