Abstract

Archives have traditionally privileged hegemonic and normative histories, often excluding marginalized people and their memories. Emerging after the archival turn of the 1990s, "counter-archival" scholarship appeared in the early 2010s, to expand definitions of "archive" to include a more diverse body of materials and historiographical methods. These alternative processes and repositories, known as a counter-archive, can be a community archival collection, an oral history practice, a curated exhibition, an archival methodology that expresses a non-dominant sensibility, artistic practice, or more. A counter-archive typically speaks to, preserves, or represents non-dominant memories from queer, racialized, diasporic, differently abled, or Indigenous peoples, whose subjectivities may often intersect or overlap. In this thesis, I consider queer Canadian documentary film as a counter-archive, one which is a process to preserve subjective and affective memory, but also as a repository, a living collection which replays these memories. I explore how queer counter-archives use queer cinematic aesthetics, archival artefacts, talking head interviews, voiceover narration and re-enactments to preserve and replay memories of queer subjects who have resisted the pull of heteronormativity, but also how creative preservation practices express the affect, relationality, and subjectivity of queer sensibility. I analyze two queer Canadian documentaries, Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (Dir. Lynne Fernie Aerlynn Weissman, 1992) and Sea in the Blood (Dir. Richard Fung, 2000). Using Muñoz’s queer utopia framework, I explore how counter-archives replay memory to produce queer utopias, visions of a world determined by queer sensibility, a way-finder towards a place charted by self-determined subjectivity.