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.

KEYWORDS:

• archive
• intimacy
• gender and sexuality
• queerness
• history and memory
• Global South

Like many other forms of ‘history from below’, queer and feminist histories face a fundamental methodological issue: conventional archives have been typically shaped by the heteronormative and gendered gaze of the (post)colonial state and its exclusionary political cultures. This means that typical procedures of archive-making and resulting collections have tended to render women’s and queer lives and experiences, more often than not, invisible. While scholars working on gender and sexuality have for long resorted to oral histories in order to fight this historical erasure, in the last decades the ‘archive’ itself has been the subject of much political and intellectual engagement (Boyd & Roque Ramirez 2012; Burton 2005; Hall 2001; Mahua Sarkar 2008; Stoler 2009; Summerskill, Murphy, & Vickers 2022). If it was once thought of as an unproblematic repository of historical documents, today most scholars and memory workers would agree that the archive should be approached critically, as an object of enquiry and a terrain of intellectual and political intervention.¹ Scholars and artists, social theorists and curators, have been invested in rethinking the archive as a metaphor and a creative concept speaking to issues of collective memory and historical narration, knowledge production and indexing, authority and violence, justice and redressal (Caswell 2014; Wallace, Duff, Saucier & Flinn 2020). In this context, feminist and queer scholarship and political mobilisation have been particularly well positioned at the forefront of emerging strategies of critical intervention, often inviting us to radically re-imagine the ‘archive’ and history, itself (Arondekar 2009; Bly & Wooten 2012; Burton 2003; Chaudhuri, Katz & Perry 2010; Cvetkovich 2003; Dever 2020; Eichhorn 2013; Freeman 2010; Fuentes 2016; Kumbier 2014; Manalansan 2014; Marshall, Murphy & Tortorici 2014; Marshall & Tortorici 2022; Rao 2020; Richards 2020; Stone & Cantrell 2015; Willems & Holla 2017). In the Global North and South alike, we have been witnessing exciting engagements with both the archive concept and with particular collections, a project that is especially productive when carried out through community mobilisation and creative practices of storytelling and reading the past. Surely, these are not academic exercises alone, but also political interventions on contemporary struggles for minority rights, belonging, and recognition (Buchanan & Bastian 2015; Danbolt 2010; Findlay 2016; Hirsch 2018; Popple, Prescott & Mutibwa 2020; Sheffield 2014; Wakimoto, Bruce & Partridge 2013).

In African studies, too, scholars have for some time been calling for the reconfiguration, reimagination, and decolonisation of the archive in creative, interdisciplinary, and politically transformative directions (Hamilton 2016; Hamilton, Harris, Taylor, Pickover, Reid & Saleh 2002; Hamilton & Skotnes 2014; Kumalo 2020a, 2020b; Mbembe 2015; Stevens, Duncan & Hook 2013). While gender, sexuality, and queerness have not typically been major concerns in these debates, in the last few years important interventions have mobilised the idea of the archive to raise new and important questions about gendered and sexualised intimacies, affect, memory, historical formations, activism, and contemporary cultural practice (Benson 2018; Camminga 2022; Disemelo 2019; Katto 2018; Macharia 2015; McEwan 2003; Migraine-George & Currier 2006; Msimang 2021; Roy, Araújo, Dosekun, Balogun & Tchouta Mougoué 2022; Sizemore-Barber 2017, 2020; Thomas 2010; Van der Vlies 2012). Contributing to this growing body of work, the present Special Issue: Intimate Archives: Interventions on Gender, Sexuality and Intimacy invited scholars in African studies – working from various disciplinary standpoints – to occupy, engage and play with the archive as a politically urgent and intellectually productive theme. For the purposes of this collective project, we did not define the archive in any particular or narrow sense. Rather, we invited creative engagements with the concept, as an intentionally multi-layered, open ended and purposefully disoriented project.² In the articles that follow, the ‘archive’ emerges 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.

This special issue intends to make a critical intervention at a time in which feminist, queer and trans archives – as political, intellectual and institutional projects closely associated with both collective struggles and critical theorisation – have already consolidated themselves around the world. Yet, Africa remains underrepresented in the global landscape of queer studies and archival theory. This may well have to do with the uneven distribution of queer archival practice, as the overwhelming majority of LGBTQI + archives, libraries and collections in existence today are located in the Global North, especially in North America, where the practice of queer archiving flourished since the 1970s (Snapp-Cook 2010). At the same time, these global, structural, inequalities have been further accentuated by the rising wave of political conservatism – including inflammatory queer- and transphobic and anti-gender agendas – which has further hindered funding and research on issues of gender and sexuality in the Global South (Corredor 2019; Klinken & Chitando 2016; McEwen 2017). Be that as it may, in Africa, queer histories remain, by and large, fragmentary and un-archived, with the exception of South Africa, where the GALA Queer Archive has been in operation since 1997. However, Southern Africa, in general, and South Africa, in particular, have been overrepresented in the burgeoning field of queer African studies. By the same token, while a prolific academic production already exists on questions of gender and sexuality in the continent, including new exciting work documenting women’s struggles in creative ways, the political and academic interest on histories of gender – on the recovery and celebration of women’s voices – has not necessarily translated into a similarly consistent effort to research and archive non-heterosexual and non-gender binaried historical experiences and past trajectories, with some notable exceptions.³ In our present historical context, as one witnesses the polarisation of positions on queer sexuality in the continent at large – from the death penalty and political persecution in some locations to rising LGBTQI + activism in others – queer histories and archives are more important than ever.

At the same time, the issue brings queer and feminist understandings to bear upon each other, as has been the impulse of political mobilisation around gender and sexuality in many locales in the Global South (the 2015–2016 student movements in South Africa – which were led by Black queer, trans and feminist students – are a case in point). Questions posed of the queer archive are necessarily feminist questions, and vice-versa. They are also decolonial questions. The making and archiving of queer and feminist collections are more than the mere writing of silenced histories and the recovery of ‘hidden voices’; perhaps most crucially, they are political acts speaking to our present aspirations for historical recognition, social change and decolonial futures. In gesturing to imaginations of a different future, these suppressed voices point to the possibility of radical utopias of queer and feminist orientation. In this special issue, we include articles that tackle these issues from various positions and points of entry, from marginalised women’s voices in literature, conventional archives of national liberation, to queer representation in the press, photography and film. We also take seriously Stella Nyanzi’s project of ‘queering Queer Africa’, which effectively means displacing South Africa as the epicentre of queer scholarship and activism in the continent (Nyanzi 2014). Alongside articles on South Africa, this issue also showcases exciting new work on Mozambique, Ethiopia, and the Maghreb. Their significance extends beyond the immediate context of consolidating conversations around queer feminist histories and presents in Africa alone. We hope the issue as a whole will inject new energy into the archival imaginations and ambitions of queer feminist colleagues and comrades everywhere – whether of affective, intimate or epistemic orientation.

Presentation of the special issue

The issue opens with Sarah Duff’s article ‘Twentieth-Century South African Women’s Memoir as Historiography’, which draws on and contributes to efforts by historians and literary scholars to restore black South African women writers and memoirists to their rightful place in the historiography of the nation. Memoirs do not merely serve a recovery function, however. As Duff writes: ‘Memoirs are an emotional archive, opening up the texture of everyday life in a way that other sources do not necessarily allow. In this way, the ‘intimacy’ of this archive derives from its revelation of affect’. She centres the memoirs of four South African anti-apartheid women activists written during apartheid or in its immediate aftermath. These are texts that rewrite struggle histories just as they broaden given understandings of activism – and even of the political. Fracturing the masculinist narrative of the liberation movement centred on the revolutionary actions of exemplary men (most represented in the ‘struggle memoir’ genre), they disrupt the idea of a unified anti-apartheid movement and ultimately, the fiction of the unitary nation itself. They also reorient our attention to spaces and agents not conventionally included in the archive of the nation. For instance, they restore the domestic and the private as sites of political struggles, and draw attention to the role played by women, young people and children, and scores of unnamed activists in the struggle to end apartheid. These intimate archives, bolstered by ambivalent affects, stretch what we understand to be public political action, beyond the case of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa alone. Women’s memoirs are thus more than ‘an archive of affect’; they also constitute an alternative, subaltern or even subversive historiography. At the same time, they gesture toward an alternative relationship to the present and to the nation and nationalisms, in particular. These memoirs – and Duff’s reading of them – thicken what we already know about women’s complex relationship to masculinist narratives of the nation, when it comes to both liberation and decolonial histories in the Global South and to resurgent right-wing nationalisms, world over.

The second article, Emily Bridger and Erin Hazan’s Surfeit and Silence: Sexual Violence in the Apartheid Archive’, also turns to the apartheid-era archive for what it reveals of longer histories and understandings of sexual violence. This archive has been insufficiently explored notwithstanding that gender-based violence – ‘GBV’ – has reached a breaking point in contemporary South Africa. The archive offers us more than longer, enduring histories of sexual violence. Given its contradictory impulses – marked by both lack and excess, invisibility and hypervisibility (when it comes to black women, in particular) – the archive raises specific challenges and offers methodological insights for those researching sexual violence. The ‘power to define and archive sexual violence’ can do further harm to its victims, for instance, as the apartheid archive amply demonstrates when it comes to the experience of black South African women. But even today, media reportage of GBV tends to render black women victims both hypervisible and silent, as Bridger and Hazan stress toward the end of their article. The historian must thus be vigilant to not commit further harm in their own acts of archiving and narration.

In pursuing this critical and self-reflexive line of enquiry, Bridger and Hazan analyse Black-readership media – newspaper and magazines, short stories and oral histories – for what these sources tell us about sexual violence during everyday urban life under apartheid. They find that sexual violence is silenced and ignored, on the one hand, and graphically and grotesquely presented, on the other. It is both spectacularised and normalised. Women’s voices and their own understandings and experiences of sexual violence are silenced at multiple levels. Yet reading them ‘along and against the grain’ offers important insights into gendered, racialised and class-inflected histories of sexual violence as well as how they were resisted, even in women’s silences and in their absent presence in the archive. Histories of sexual violence are not just crucial to finding clues to the question, ‘how did we get here’, when it comes to GBV in the present, but also to restore the subjectivity and agency of women as overwhelmingly victims of sexual violence.

Continuing the special issue’s engagement with text, Gibson Ncube’s and Adriaan van Klinken’s article ‘Abdellah Taïa and an emergent queer African Islamic discourse: Texts, visibility and intimate archives’, discusses the work of the first openly gay Moroccan novelist (Taïa), as an instance not merely of African queer desire and sexuality, but also of an emergent queer African Islamic discourse. In placing this work in conversation with a wider set of texts from and on the African continent, they give us a robust and capacious intimate queer archive that is culturally-specific, but also pan-African in its reach. Indeed, literary works are productive, the authors argue, of a ‘queer pan-African discourse’, while also comprising an archive of African and non-Western queer lived experiences more generally. Constituted as such, this intimate queer archive offers a robust alternative to the narrow regional attachments of African Queer Studies, gesturing to the possibilities of ‘trans-continental and inter-regional dialogue[s]’.

Like the previous contributions, the archive serves more than a recovery function here. On the one hand, it counters the marginality of North Africa – and especially the Maghreb – in queer African scholarship. On the other hand, it challenges the religious and, more precisely, anti-Islam biases of Western-centric queer rights discourse and politics. Critically positioned against crude understandings of Islam as intrinsically homophobic, the literary texts examined in this contribution show how Islam made room for queerness on the continent – and how queerness in turn inflects and shapes the religion – and not just in the contemporary moment. This intimate queer archive thus goes beyond the work of recovering and revealing, to disrupt ideas of queer liveability and freedom as attached to Northern liberal and secular imaginaries alone. When it comes to the intersection of religion and queerness, Ncube and van Klinken go further to reveal Islam as a ‘resource for queer agency, creativity and subjectivity’, and especially for African cultural production. Literary texts like Taïa’s novels offer an opportunity to reposition Islam as a queer religion, that is, to find within it room for non-normative or queer freedoms and liveability. The intimate archive offers a way of ‘(re)inventing intimate freedom, from within Islam’.

The following article, Maria Paula Meneses’ ‘Silent agents of nationalist struggle? Women of Mozambique, fighting a war within a war, raises critical questions of gendered representation by exploring the silencing and erasure of women’s narratives in Mozambique’s (post)colonial archive and historiography. Instead of presenting us yet another celebratory reading of female combatants in the frontline, Meneses complicates the history of women’s participation in the national liberation struggle by exploring how ordinary women ‘survived, lived and loved in the midst of structural violence, dispossession and racial segregation’. The article both engages and displaces the authority of the official record. While it resorts to archival research and newspaper analysis, the argument is most significantly based on a rich oral history archive speaking to the quotidian and intimate experiences of ‘women whose lives were profoundly affected by armed violence’. In doing so, Meneses is able to produce a sophisticated critique of the nationalist historiographic project, which, she explains, ‘by not paying attention to subordinate silences, gradually gave rise to the inability to listen, crystalising muteness’. As with the affective archive uncovered by Duff in South African women activist memoirs, Mozambican women’s personal testimonies shift dominant male-centric narratives of the liberation struggle, as they centre instead the gendered politics of intimacy, affect, and sexual violence undergirding the anti-colonial war and its aftermath. Meneses convincingly argues that women’s erasure from official history is not only a political issue, but also an epistemic one, relating to the knowledge production practices and protocols of historical narration that have continually legitimised some actors, experiences, and projects at the expense of others. In this view, women’s narratives constitute ‘contingent knowledges’ pointing to ‘a different story, of a war within a war, of the struggle of women for their own emancipation, a fundamental part of the African liberation’. In proposing the ‘deep listening’ of marginalised, quiet, voices in the (post)colonial archive, Meneses positions her intervention as an ‘an exercise in decolonising history’.

The politics and epistemology of the archive is also the central focus of the following article, Serawit Debele’s ‘Trans(forming) Archives: Speculative Biographies of Ethiopians in Between and Beyond Genders’. Debele turns the archive against itself, as she examines crime reports pertaining to gender non-conforming people living in Addis Ababa in the 1970s as a strategy of critiquing precisely the ‘criminal framing’ through which these historical actors were inscribed into the official (criminal) record. Mostly drawing on reports published by Polisna Ermjaw, an Amharic bimonthly Police newspaper, Debele proposes a speculative methodology that sits ‘in between history and literary writing, and for which an imaginative reading [of the sources] is necessary’. Taking the us through the reimagined lives and reconstructed, speculative biographies of three gender non-conforming Ethiopians, the article pushes us to interrogate ‘what possibilities might emerge if we engage the archive through critical fabulation’. This creative approach necessarily challenges the authority of the criminal record, rejecting the state’s regimes of truth in favour of a radical reimagination, and a critical recovery of the subjectivities, ordinary lives, and humanity of historical actors living in between gender roles and beyond normative gender systems. In bringing together archival research, oral history, and speculative approaches, Debele puts forth a research agenda in which archives are fundamentally transformed, open to critical fabulation and rearrangement, and challenged in their ‘discursive regularity’. She makes the powerful and provocative case for epistemic disloyalty to the ‘order of archives’, thus opening the terrain for new forms of reading that trespass the boundaries of ‘both the archive and the parameters of writing history’. Ultimately, these efforts to displace the conventional archive are moved not by a will to forget a traumatic or a violent past, but by the ethical and political imperative of telling transformed stories. In the article, this means reconstituting biographies, so that the gender non-conforming subject is seen in its human plenitude, no longer reduced to the violence and de-humanisation of the criminal record.

The special issue concludes with another incursion into the politics and epistemology of queer and trans archiving. Caio Simões de Araújo’s ‘Sex, Lives, and Videotape: the Trans Historicity of an Itinerant Visual Archive’ takes on the challenge of addressing the ‘history problem’ of queer and trans studies in manners that are intellectually productive and politically transformative. By following the biography of a videotape found at the GALA Queer Archive, in Johannesburg, the article presents the complicated itinerancies of a visual archive scattered through Mozambique, South Africa, and Denmark. Araújo’s exploration of visuality and visual materials, such as videos and photographs, performs a critical displacement, as it questions the ‘primacy of language – and the problematic of legibility – in queer scholarship’. Instead, the article interrogates what forms of queer and trans history are made possible once ‘we introduce the materiality and the mediation of the camera as a technology of both social visibility and self-inscription’. In doing so, Araújo explores and historicises the making of a particular visual collection pertaining to the short film and related photo series Manas (Sisters), conceptualised, shot and produced in Maputo, Mozambique, by the Danish photographer and filmmaker Ditte Haarløv Johnsen. The images capture a period of queer effervescence in the early 2000s, when a group of queer folks – described by themselves and others simultaneously as homosexuals, gays, travestis, or simply as manas (sisters) – gained increased social visibility in Mozambican society. The article examines the politics and practices of visual representation underlying the making and public display of these photographs, as they affected the people directly involved in their production and provoked contrasting, at times dramatic, reactions from the publics they encountered, as they travelled between Johannesburg and Maputo. Rather than an archive that conventionally documents and reifies particular forms of queer or trans pastness, Araújo takes this visual collection as representative of the destabilising intellectual and political labour that an itinerant, queered, archive can do.

This special issue follows from a sustained conversation held over 2021, via a webinar series of the same name, organised by the Governing Intimacies Project. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of the Witwatersrand, the project sought to rethink gender and sexuality comparatively and collaboratively, across South-South registers. As curators of the year-long webinar series, we were interested in bringing together scholars, activists, and cultural practitioners to occupy the archive as a site of political possibility, of critical thinking, and of feminist and queer theorisation. We were particularly interested in promoting collaborative dialogue across disciplinary and professional boundaries, between scholarship and activism, and between feminist and LGBTQI + agendas and utopian projects. Throughout the year, we took gender, sexuality and intimacy not as objects of academic study alone, but also as lived terrains of intervention, sensibility and creativity. The webinar series resulted in a digital archive of our own collective research practices, of our emerging forms of feminist and queer critique, which is now fully accessible on YouTube.⁴ This special issue builds on this previous dialogue – and some of the authors featured here were active participants of the webinar series – but also expands the landscape of our interrogations in important ways.

As a collective intellectual effort, the contributions show how the archive is more than a resource for documentation or even representation. It is vital for purposes of critique, transformation and imaginative world-making. It directs our gaze to not just what is but what can or ought to be. Together the articles share the sensibility that it is not enough to recover and restore such experiences to the historical record, as has tended to be the major impulse when it comes to gendered, racialised and sexualised subjectivities in the Global South.⁵ This special issue raises the stakes with its demand for an intimate and affective archive that is both a commentary on what was, in the past, but also a gesture toward what could be, or the future as a locus of possibility. Queer feminist African pasts and futures deftly shape our understanding of sexual and gender rights, citizenship and belonging, nation, memory-making and decolonisation, across the Global North and the South.

Acknowledgements

It was a pleasure to curate the individual papers for this volume, and we would like to thank all the contributors for their commitment to it. Our thanks to editors Claudia Gastrow and Joey Kok for ensuring a smooth process of review and publication in African Studies. Governing Intimacies, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Grant number 41600691) and Wits University made the webinar series possible from which these conversations first emerged. Finally, Srila Roy would like to thank Caio Simões de Araújo for his intellectual leadership and resourcefulness, without which this issue would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was declared by the authors

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Caio Simões de Araújo

Caio Simões de Araújo is a postdoctoral fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research of the University of the Witwatersrand working in the project Regions 2050. His recent work focuses on a transnational history of colonialism, decolonisation and international relations in the 20th century, with particular emphasis on histories of race, gender, and sexuality in the Global South. He currently collaborates with GALA, a public history institution based in Johannesburg and committed to archiving histories of queer subjectivities and struggles in Southern Africa.

Srila Roy

Srila Roy is a professor of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her long-standing research and teaching expertise is in transnational feminist and sexuality studies. Her latest books are the co-edited Intimacy and Injury: In the Wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa (Manchester University Press, 2022) and the sole-authored, award-winning Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India (Duke University Press, 2022). She is a co-editor of the journal Feminist Theory and associate editor of Sociology Compass.

Notes

1 Much of this critical interest on the politics and theory of the archive has been credited to impact of the work of Michel Foucault and, later, Jacques Derrida on the matter. See: Foucault (1972), Derrida (1995) and Adina Arvatu (2011).

2 On the productive power of disorientation, see Ahmed (2005).

3 A notable example of a creative engagement with the women’s struggle archive is Koni Benson’s oral history project (2022), where oral narratives served to inspire a graphic novel. In terms of queer and trans archiving and publishing, the GALA Queer Archive has done much in the last decades, particularly through their imprint, MaThoko’s Books. In the last few years alone they have curated and published some remarkable contributions to queer archive-making in the region, including graphic short stories, queer activists anthologies, and a photographic documentary book. See: Araújo (2021), Qintu Collab (2019), Soudien (2022), Taboom Media (2022) and Taboom Media & GALA Queer Archive (2021). Other relevant queer documentary projects published in the last few years include Edwards and Marc Epprecht (2020), Marnell (2021), and The Nest Collective (2015).

4 See: https://www.youtube.com/@governingintimacies5783.

5 For the critique of the restorative paradigm in queer historiography, see: Arondekar (2009).