Queer.Archive.Work #2, 1923 Internet Archive Edition (2019)
This text was delivered as a talk to an audience of a thousand attendees at the “Grand Re-opening of the Public Domain” in the grand hall of the Internet Archive on January 25, 2019, co-hosted by Creative Commons. It was later published on the Internet Archive’s blog. The piece reflects my time in residence at the Internet Archive, our collective responsibility to perform archival justice, and the making of the second issue of Queer.Archive.Work, which I published and distributed for this event.
“We usually think about archives as places of abundance. Deep, rich sites that house a multitude of perspectives. This can certainly be true, but archives are also sites of erasure, allowing some voices or perspectives to be minimized and excluded when they don’t fit into normative narratives.
Traditionally, stories involving people of color, queer people, and other historically-marginalized voices have been left out of archives, or diminished, because of ignorance, homophobia, and racism. Histories aren’t “discovered” in archives; rather, we use archives to actively construct versions of history, stories that accommodate our own subjective positions and ideologies. All too frequently, these stories favor the familiar structures of oppressive power—whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalism.”