Around the world, LGBTQ histories are under attack. In February 2025, a U.S. presidential executive order erased ‘queer’ and ‘trans’ from national historical monuments and websites, including the Stonewall National Monument. Such acts of erasure are nothing new. In 1933, Nazi officials publicly burned books looted from the Institute of Sexology, a Berlin research centre on queer and trans lives. Today, history groups, both academic and community-based, are organizing to resist these renewed attempts to efface the queer/trans past.
In this seminar course, we will take this most recent battle in the history/culture wars as our starting point. In the context of amplified anti-trans essentialism (in April 2025, the U.K. Supreme Court ruled that the category “woman” applies only to someone born biologically female), we will explore the historical basis of sexual and gender divergence. In the face of the increasing political backlash against queer communities (in March 2025, the Hungarian government passed a law banning Pride events in that country), we will adopt queer archiving as a strategy against historical erasure.
Seminar reading and discussion will introduce students to the rich literature on queer and trans archives, covering everything from colonial New Spain to twenty-first-century South Asia. A collaborative course project will focus on the “Kingston LGBTQ2S+ Archive,” a collection of the Queen’s University Archives, to think through the connections and dislocations between the local and global. Prospective seminar participants will include both those who identify as queer and anyone interested in exploring critical queer perspectives on history, politics, and archives.
