Disidentification and Documentation: LGBTQ Records as Emergent, Entangled Rhetoric

ABSTRACT

This article engages archival and oral history research to explore the documentation practices of Gays and Lesbians United for Equality (GLUE), a lesbian and gay organization active in Louisville during the 1980s and 1990s, and their effects on the production of an LGBTQ archive by local activist David Williams. I demonstrate one way of considering the rhetoricity of archives by attending to the situated rhetorical production of materials that comprise them, exploring the relationships between GLUE’s motivated production of organizational documents and the material made available to Williams’s archive. Organizationally, GLUE could not directly engage in explicitly political activity, leading to rhetorical decisions about what to include in organizational documents. These rhetorical performances, as circulated in GLUE’s documents, reflect complicated rhetorical strategies of what Jose Estéban Muñoz calls disidentification with politics.

Notes

1. Many thanks to RR reviewers, Londie Martin and Pamela VanHaitsma, for their invaluable feedback on this article.

2. This distinction between the WNA as an LGBTQ archive and GLUE as a lesbian and gay-rights organization is significant. Williams collects materials related to a range of non-normative identifications, experiences, and performances. As an organization, however, GLUE was primarily oriented towards the experiences of lesbian gay organizations during these years.

3. These minutes were taken before “for Equality” was added to GLUE’s title, hence the slightly different acronym.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rick Wysocki

Rick Wysocki is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Ball State University. His current work intersects the rhetoric and politics of queer archives, material rhetoric, and media theory. Additionally, he is an editor of the Disputatio section of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. To connect with him and/or learn more about his work, visit www.rickwysocki.com or email him at [email protected].