Abstract

Using a queer feminist framework, this research combines interviews with archivists and activists, theoretical texts and artists' intervention to explore the paradoxical nature of archiving absence. Specifically, the first chapter surveys and documents three Canadian archives mandated in part to collect, record and preserve lesbians' and queer women's histories: The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Toronto, The Canadian Women's Movement Archives in Ottawa, and the Archives gaies du Québec in Montréal. Focusing on the absence of women within archival holdings and as community archivists, the second chapter proposes a philosophical "queering of the archive" which both expands and complicates the pervading critiques about the totality and neutrality of archives and exposes the theoretical (if not utopian) potential of challenging the archive, operationally and conceptually, to answer this absence. Ultimately, this queering puts into question the very foundation of community that privileges gender and sexuality within its identity politics, while reinforcing their presence and position within gay and lesbian history and queer discourse.