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TURNING
ARCHIVAL
A book in the series
Radical Perspectives:
A Radical History Review book series
Series editors:
Daniel J. Walkowitz, New York University
Barbara Weinstein, New York University
Duke University Press Durham and London 2022

TURNING
ARCHIVAL
The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies
edit ed by da n i el m ar sh all an d
zeb to rto ri c i
© 2022 Duke University Press All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker
Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro and Din
by Westchester Publishing Services
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Marshall, Daniel, [date] editor. | Tortorici, Zeb, [date] editor.
Title: Turning archival : the life of the historical in queer studies /
[edited by] Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici.
Other titles: Radical perspectives.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2022. | Series: Radical
perspectives | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2021059689 (print) | lccn 2021059690 (ebook)
isbn 9781478015345 (hardcover)
isbn 9781478017974 (paperback)
isbn 9781478022589 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Gay and lesbian studies—Archival resources. | Gays—
History—Sources. | Gays—Research. | Queer theory. | bisac: social
science / lgbtq Studies / Gay Studies | history / World
Classification: lcc hq75.15 .t837 2022 (print) | lcc hq75.15 (ebook) |
ddc 306.76/6—dc23/eng/20220404
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059689
lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059690
Cover art: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, H1 (haunting Ebun Sodipo) and

H2 (haunting Tobi Adebajo), 2021. Video hologram diptych. Installation
dimensions variable. Edition of 4, with 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist.
Contents
Acknowledgments · vii
Introduction: (RE)TURNING TO THE QUEER ARCHIVES · 1

daniel marshall and zeb tortorici
1. ARCHIVES, BODIES, AND IMAGINATION: THE CASE OF JUANA

AGUILAR AND QUEER APPROACHES TO HISTORY, SEXUALITY, AND POLITICS · 33
maría elena martínez
2. DECOLONIAL ARCHIVAL IMAGINARIES: ON LOSING, PERFORMING,

AND FINDING JUANA AGUILAR · 63
zeb tortorici
3. TELLING TALES: SEXUALITY, ARCHIVES, SOUTH ASIA · 93

anjali arondekar
4. ORDINARY LESBIANS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS: THE JUNE L.

MAZER LESBIAN ARCHIVES AT UCLA · 111
ann cvetkovich
5. PERFORMING QUEER ARCHIVES: ARGENTINE AND SPANISH POLICING

FILES FOR UNINTENDED AUDIENCES (1950S–1970S) · 141
javier fernández-g aleano
6. LOOKING A
FTER MRS. G: APPROACHES AND METHODS FOR READING
TRANSSEXUAL CLINICAL CASE FILES · 165
emmett harsin drager
7. NAMING AFRIKA’S ARCHIVE “QUEER PAN-A FRICANISM” · 185

elliot james
8. SECONDH AND CULTURES, EPHEMERAL EROTICS, AND QUEER
REPRODUCTION: NOTES ON COLLECTING DAVID BOWIE RECO RDS · 203
daniel marshall
9. PIRATES AND PUNKS: BOOTLEGS, ARCHIVES, AND PERF ORM ANCE

IN MEXICO CITY · 233
iván a. ramos
10. UNFIXED: MATERIALIZING DISABILITY AND QUEERNESS IN

THREE OBJECTS · 259
kate clark and david serlin
11. AN ARCHIVAL LIFE: UNSETTLING QUEER IMMIGRANT DWELLINGS · 285

martin f. manalansan iv
12. REASSESSING “THE ARCHIVE” IN QUEER THEORY · 303

kate eichhorn
13. CROCKER LAND: A MIRAGE IN THE ARCHIVE · 321

carolyn dinshaw and marget long
CODA: WHO W
ERE WE TO DO SUCH A T HING? GRASSROOTS NECESSITIES,
GRASSROOTS DREAMING: THE LHA IN ITS EARLY YEARS · 347
joan nestle
Contributors · 359
Index · 365
vi · Contents
Acknowledgments
Turning Archival has been a long time in the making, and we are grateful to
those who—over the years—made this project possible. The idea for the book
came about a fter we, with Kevin P. Murphy, coedited two special issues of Radical
History Review (no. 120 from 2014 and no. 122 from 2015) on the topic of “Queer-
ing Archives,” and we wish to thank Kevin for his unflagging support for that
project and for contributing thoughts and ideas to this book. We also would
like to thank Tom Harbison and the editorial board of rhr for their help and
support along the way toward publishing those two issues. We thank Duke
University Press for permission to republish revised versions of the articles of
María Elena Martínez, Martin F. Manalansan IV, and Joan Nestle h ere. Special
thanks go to Sarah Gualtieri, who offered the support, consultation, and close
readings that enabled us to publish an expanded version of Martínez’s ar-
ticle in Turning Archival. We are grateful, too, to Joan Nestle, who provided
inspiration, ideas, and encouragement for this project. Special thanks are re-
served for both Gisela Fosado and Alejandra Mejía, our editors at Duke Uni-
versity Press, who have stuck with us throughout this project, offering criti-
cal support, feedback, guidance, and patience along the way. As always, it has
been a pleasure—personally and intellectually—to work with them toward
the realization of this book. Our contributors too have been patient as we have
brought this book into the world, and we thank them for all their work and for
the vibrancy of their ideas which have been a powerful motor for this project.
Anonymous readers of this manuscript, and the Duke University Press Editorial
Advisory Board, provided generous and generative feedback and we gratefully
acknowledge their input, which has made this a better book. We are thankful
as well to several scholars, archivists, and activists who, in one way or another,
left their mark on this project: Sara Ahmed, Tamara Chaplin, Jonathan Ned
Katz, Oraison Larmon, Deborah Levine, Tavia Nyong’o, Susan Stryker, Marvin J.
Taylor, and Jeffrey Weeks, among others. In Melbourne, the Australian Queer
Archives and Deakin University’s School of Communication and Creative
Arts and its Gender and Sexuality Studies Research Network provided a nour-
ishing intellectual environment supporting this work; and Daniel also thanks
Valda Marshall, Roger Marshall, Gary Jaynes, Mary Lou Rasmussen, Anna
Hickey-Moody, Michal Morris, Don Hill, Dino Hodge, Geoffrey Robinson,
Eliza Smith, Peter Aggleton, Rob Cover, Benjamin Hegarty, Timothy Jones,
and Duane Duncan. In New York City, the Department of Spanish and Portu-
guese Languages and Literatures at New York University has been a supportive
intellectual environment to carry out this work. Zeb wishes to acknowledge the
help of the archivists at the Archivo General de Centro América, and especially
Anna Carla Ericastilla for her unflagging support. Last, we are extremely grate-
ful to the nyu Center of the Humanities, and especially to Ulrich Baer and
Molly Rogers, for supporting this project with a book subvention grant, and to
Jen Burton for assisting with the indexing of the book.
The book’s cover artwork is based on art by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: H1

(haunting Ebun Sodipo) and H2 (haunting Tobi Adebajo), 2021, video holo-
gram diptych. These pieces are featured in the artist’s exhibition Get Home Safe
at David Kordansky Gallery. Situated throughout Get Home Safe are video
portraits composed using motion capture data, which records the movement
of objects and people. Here, Brathwaite-Shirley records data from Black trans
people and converts the data into text, which, in turn, gives the human form in
these works a new, readable body. The portraits speak to visitors of the exhibi-
tion and depict Black trans people from a range of source materials, both found
by and given to the artist. Also included are images of people Brathwaite-Shir-
ley meets; each participant receives compensation for their time and the per-
sonal stories they share. The portraits are both homages and testaments to the
power of speaking about the fullest range of life experiences. Likewise, they
document the process of assuming agency for the ways in which one is remem-
bered and identified by the community at large.
viii · Acknowledgments
Introduction
(Re)Turning to the Queer Archives

daniel marshall and zeb tortorici
This anthology centers on the queer archival turn at the intersection of fem-
inist and queer studies, literary and cultural studies, and history. The book is
born from the relationship between ideas of archives and the cultural, politi
cal, and embodied work of turning.1 We focus on how ideas about the archive
have been shaped by rhetorics and practices of specific types of turns, and on
the work of turning itself as part of epistemological, historiographical, and
archival production. In this light, the book interrogates the cultural politics
of turning to the archives—the roles and functions that archives and archi-
val knowledges are pressed into to serve a multitude of shifting demands. It
also analyzes multiple turns among and away from archives. Our contributors
trace overlapping and at times contradictory sequences of turns, where diverse
physical objects deposited into (or excluded from) the archives get turned into
forms of knowledge, which are then deployed and put to work by a wide range
of investigative turns to “the archive” as a site for the imagining and writing of
history about sex, gender, and sexuality. Archives are places where material gets
turned into something else: evidence or loss, history or an inspiration to do his-
tory differently. We are interested, then, in the transformative histories echoing
inside the term “to turn,” and in how “the archival” gets turned into a distinct
form of archival endeavor when the records being archived focus explicitly on
sex, gender, and sexuality. Indeed, insofar as the queer archival turn might be
inseparable from p eople’s experiences of being turned on, intellectually or eroti-
cally, by what one discovers in the past, it is also inseparable from developments
which have seen this emphasis change understandings of what an archive is (or
what it can be).
The so-called archival turn in the humanities typically refers to the frenetic
pace of interdisciplinary interest in notions of “the archive” following the 1995
publication of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.2 Yet as
Ann Laura Stoler writes, “the archival turn has a wider arc and a longer durée.
Archive Fever compellingly captured that impulse by giving it theoretical stat-
ure, but Jacques Derrida’s intervention came only a fter the ‘archival turn’ was
already being made.”3 The “archival turn” might best be seen, then, as a part
of the broader reimagination of the archive in the humanities and the social
sciences in the final decades of the twentieth century.4 As Ruth Rosengarten
notes, “The trope of ‘the turn’ has coloured the history of the humanities for
over half a c entury: we’ve had quantitative, linguistic, cultural and spatial turns
in the academy. The figure of a corporeal change of position and orientation is
used, then, to make intelligible a structure of reflexivity, and importantly, with
it, a shift in aesthetic and cognitive direction, if not paradigm.”5 The figuration
of this “turn” to the archives has, of course, been shaped by disciplinary per-
spectives by those whose fields have not traditionally involved archives in the
first place. Part of the controversial nature of this so-called turn is the always
immanent risk of erasing the work in core disciplinary fields like library and in-
formation studies (or archivistics) and history, where archival theory and praxis
have been most fully developed. Contentiously, as other disciplines turned on to
the archive, what they often brought with them was at least an implicit critique
that archives had up until then circulated within their natural disciplinary homes
as largely uninterrogated “depositories of documents.”6 The “archival turn” has
often been framed in general terms not only as an engagement with archival
knowledges and methods from fresh disciplinary perspectives, but also as an
aggressive project of theorization that problematically often imagined archives
as “virgin territories” ripe for fresh theoretical cultivation. It is precisely the per-
formative elements of this work that interest us here—unpacking how the ar-
chival turn has generated particularly queer ways of knowing archives and the
bodies and desires they house. Some of the many operations through which
people and things “turn archival” become evident in the ways that the chapters
of Turning Archival trace the life of the historical in the field of queer studies.
What queer means, of course, is not straightforward. Since the arrival of the
term into a range of disciplines in the 1990s, queer has been contested, especially
within lgbtq history.7 Part of the controversy of queer as it emerged in some
early formations was its centering of a narrow set of privileged perspectives and
presumptions under the sign of a purportedly radical deconstruction. As many
historians and scholars persuasively argued, early deconstructionist work in
queer theory routinely decontextualized the study of sex, gender, and sexuality,
2 · Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici
ahistoricizing scholarship and privileging a mode of critique that problemati-
cally often reproduced uneven power relations that gender and sexuality stud-
ies had historically sought to trouble (the privileging of white perspectives or the
marginalization of critical engagements with class in some early queer studies are
examples of this). In much of the e arlier scholarship in gay and lesbian stud-
ies and queer studies—and indeed, much scholarship today—queer has often
been taken as an unstated default, a presumption of a white, able-bodied, cis-
normative, middle-class subject of Eurocentric modernity, whose “queerness”
nonetheless falls outside certain norms. In t hese deployments of queer, its rep-
utation for subversion came to rest, problematically, on an effacement of a raft
of dominant power relations that much queer scholarship has since sought to
bring into focus. The conceptual union between turning and queer is a gen-
erative one, then, b ecause it indexes movement within queer studies to turn
the focus of critique to neglected perspectives and marginalized knowledges.
Part of this turn within queer studies over the last quarter-century has been
a refreshed engagement with materialism and materialist critique, and a reap-
praisal of the significance of lived experience. This (re)turn to the materiality
of the body and how it intersects with sex, sexuality, and gender has brought
renewed attention to the practices and politics of embodiment that have been
so crucial in the cultural politics and histories of gender and sexuality studies.
The problematic functioning of queer as reinstating a set of unstated default
presumptions turned into, especially in the 1990s and early 2000s, an impetus
to reshape the boundaries, subjects, and methods of queer studies from within.
Work in a range of disciplinary fields—and especially born out of feminist stud-
ies and queer of color critique in its early years—turned to the archives precisely
as a way of documenting the presence of difference to challenge queer’s false
normativities and to help foster the development of the material conditions
to support the staging of critiques that broadened the scope of queer. Work in
the exponentially growing field of trans studies, for example, illustrates this ap-
proach through efforts to develop approaches in community lgbtq archiving
and in the simultaneous development of both public and scholarly archival
knowledges (Susan Stryker’s work is a powerful example of how queer stud-
ies has been reshaped by moves within trans studies to turn to the archives).8
Part of what is so radical about the intersection of trans studies and queer of
color critique in relation to the archive is that it has excavated what the ar-
chive means and how archival knowledge gets produced. Our reading of the
performativity of the queer archival turn draws on how scholars like C. Riley
Snorton have theorized archival knowledges as active sites of meaning-making,
where trans and blackness achieve significance to each other in part through
Introduction · 3
their apprehensions in the archives. For Snorton, “ ‘black on both sides’ re-
fers to the temporal, spatial, and semantic concerns that are multiplicatively
redoubled—between, beside, within, and across themselves—in transitive and
transversal relation.”9 For the contributors to Turning Archival, then, the queer
archival turn is a meaning-making maneuver that provides new ways of theo-
rizing the idiom of the archive and new forms of embodiment in relation to it.
Similarly, the field of critical disability or crip studies has also reshaped the
archive through notions of embodiment, questions of access, and notions of
crip time. This notion of crip time challenges understandings of the archival
through critical reflections on embodied experiences of how differently abled
bodies move through archival space and time in particular ways: “Crip time
is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear,
progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of
backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and
abrupt endings.”10 Through the insights of crip studies and its elaboration of
diverse practices of embodiment, notions of the archival have been reshaped
by reappropriated engagements with historical notions of archival (dis)order,
exposing the poverty of an unreconstructed archive studies which relies on
the fictive presumptions of an unchallenged ableism. Records creation and ar-
chival description, as Gracen Brilmyer has shown, have long played a role in
documenting and surveilling “disabled” and other non-normative bodies and
minds.11 Yet through crip interventions in the archive, the once-regulatory ar-
chive gets turned into something larger, something more capacious, to accom-
modate the diverse embodied histories it contains. These very same archives
become places to find and connect with the “knowledge learned through one’s
own disabled insights as well as t hose of crip kin and ancestors.”12 And as Ryan
Lee Cartwright shows, crip time in the archives breaks and reassembles order
in the archives in line with the embodied experience of turning to the archive:
“The disabled researcher’s shaking, seizing, stimming and drooling have been
deemed ‘impediments’ to the important work of the archive and its orderli-
ness.”13 Through varied modes of living and experiencing crip time—outside of
the archives, and within—it is not only that the archive expands to house unruly
disorder but that all of this diverse embodiment reshapes the archive itself, expos-
ing the limitations of ableist archival imaginaries. Centering and prizing such
diverse archival “impediments,” we are engaging with queer, then, in the same
way that we are engaging with the archival: as ideas in motion, they function
as terms of a critical destabilization which has been manifest in queer studies
through the growing diversity of embodied experience that now characterizes
the field. And while the referents of the queer archival turn may necessarily be
“unfixed,” what centers the queer archival turn is this figure of the body and
how critiques, rejections, friendly amendments, and cautions regarding queer
at some level revolve around questions of embodiment—the racially minori-
tized, gendered, classed, cripped, transed bodies—that push back on queer’s
unstated body-norms.14 Turning to the queer archive, then involves turning away
from it—we want to turn away from queer’s unstated body-norms to bring into
focus other bodies, other archived desires, other histories, and our work h ere
is informed by critiques that help us expand how we understand links between
archives and embodiment. Turning Archival turns to the life of the historical
in queer studies in the spirit of how t hese disciplines have turned the archive
back on itself to invent new archival studies for the future, and revised un-
derstandings of the archival through reflections on the generative labor and
preservation of embodiment itself.
*
To think about the “archival turn” in queer terms is to understand how the idea
of the archives turns on this notion of turning—it is to put the very notion
of the turn itself front and center. The idea of turning resists easy immobili-
zation; instead it encompasses multidirectionality, and movements and fric-
tions that traverse space and time. The wide semantic range just lurking u nder
the definitional veneer of the “turn” illustrates its twisting analytical potential.
As a verb of motion, “to turn” might signify—as it did in the late Old English
turnian and the M iddle English tournen, tornen, and turnen, which absorbed
their meanings from earlier Old English terms that separated out their mean-
ings (and directions) of motion—either “the motion of turning back to the
direction of the place from which the subject came” or “to go (on in the same
direction).”15 The very idea of the turn, in its late Old English etymological
roots, thus already represents the proliferation of directionalities, the fecund
capacity of multidirectionality, that we associate with the term. Turn is
partly derived from the Latin tornare, which signified “to turn in a lathe” and
is related to the Latin word for a “turner’s wheel,” that is, a machine for shap-
ing wood or metal by means of rotation.16 In modern English, the word turn
turns up a complex assemblage of connotations, ranging from the (literal and
figurative) “turning point,” a place or time at which a decisive change takes place;
a turn (of a river) as a “place of bending”; to “take a turn” as in a sudden alteration
in the state or ability of the body or mind; and to “turn up,” as deployed early
in this sentence, to convey an arrival or appearance. Key instantiations of to
turn denote change and transformation through some form of rotation, as the
Proto-Indo-European root of the word—tere-, meaning to rub, drill, pierce,
and twist—suggests.17 Turning Archival capaciously plays with these many
Introduction · 5
meanings, investigating how turning to the archives can be understood in terms
of friction, pleasure, and desire, always caught up in unsteady—and relentlessly
generative—processes of transformation.
The work of turning is similarly yoked to regimes of power that produce
transformations, in different scales and with different implications. This is one
reason there is something inherently queer about turning: its obsessive orien-
tation toward transformation means that the work of turning often involves
taking simplified options—usually binary options—and knitting or kneading
them together, turning so many figurative threads into a shawl or a few ingre-
dients into a dough. Like queerness, practices of turning constitute the lability
of whatever constituent elements are at hand. Turning often involves taking
disparate elements and producing something different from their almost al-
chemical combination; turning is often described in magical terms (as the ma-
gician turns, say, a handkerchief in a hat into a rabbit, so too are discoveries in
the archives often described as turning into something of a diff erent order than
what the archival thing is in and of itself ). Turning invokes ideas about trans-
formation in other registers, too. For example, the phrase “to turn oneself in”
(or to be “turned in”) references an individual’s subjection to particular types of
authorities, a process that typically sets in motion an archivable documentary
trail that transforms the juridical subject (e.g., from free citizen to prisoner),
providing a clear illustration of links between ideas of turning and bureaucratic
regimes of power. From juridical judgment to esoteric magic, and from knit-
ted blankets to baked breads, the cultural history of turning is replete with so
many different routines for alterations in signification that the changes pro-
duced by turning in—donating, giving up, selling, losing, or bequeathing—
an object to the archive, and then turning to it for one use or another, might
appear to be just one other illustration of the work of transformation in the
long cultural history of turns and turning. Yet there is something specific about
turning queerly. The deep attachments inspired by the specifically queer archival
turn—evidenced by its successful c areer both inside the academy and outside of
it—invite more direct exploration of the constitution and resonance of its par
ticular significance. For us, the notion of turning archival frames an investment
in exploring how, through a kind of mutual reliance, certain t hings turn into
something that can be named both “queer” and “archival.” In other words, the
notion of turning archival calls up or designates practices of reflection through
which we might come to more closely track the diverse ways notions of queer-
ness and the archive are iteratively produced through our turns to them. A key
project of the queer archival turn becomes the work of turning to reflect on
itself and the myriad ways in which the cultural politics of archives, archival
practices, preserved material things, classificatory structures, their epistemo-
logical limits, and diverse rationales driving users to turn to the archives all
get stitched together in discrete, often fleeting, and always mobile moments of
signification and meaning-making. In turning archival, the queer archival turn
turns toward a wall of mirrors or, perhaps, a mirage.
The proliferation of what an archive might be is a defining characteristic
of the popularization of archives over the past half-century. As Kate Eichhorn
notes, “Since the archival turn in the early 1990s, researchers have reconfig-
ured everything from collections of graffiti under highway overpasses to the
human genome as types of archives. The plasticity of the concept has opened
up new avenues through which to question the authority of the archive while
simultaneously legitimizing non-institutional collections as important sites of
research and inquiry.”18 It has thus become commonplace, as Geert-Jan Van Bus-
sel and Marlene Manoff respectively discuss, to hear of configurations including
the “social archive,” the “raw archive,” the “postcolonial archive,” the “popular ar-
chive,” the “ethnographic archive,” the “geographical archive,” and the “liberal
archive.”19 To this list we might add the “intimate archive,” the “affective archive,”
the “porn archive,” the “ethnopornographic archive,” the “medical archive,” the
“torture archive,” the “poetic archive,” the “performative archive,” the “rebel ar-
chive,” and so on.20 Indeed, the term’s ubiquity threatens to empty it of a pre-
cise significance. Unsurprisingly then, the “queer archive” more often than not
serves as a black box, an ambiguous signifier into which the deployer of the term
pours their hopes, fantasies, and anxieties. Valentines are written to the queer
archive, and it is set out as a familiar site for cultural lamentation. Almost half
a century after the establishment of community lgbtq archives, the notion
of the queer archive is seen by some as an idea that has lost useful specificity. But
like the zombies in The Return of the Living Dead, queer archives refuse to die as
the knowledges they signify get reanimated, over and over. We return to the ar-
chives queerly, then, to explore how the fragments of the past—all that ephem-
eral dust, desire, and documentary incompletion—get turned, again and again,
into material to feast on in the present.
The possibilities—of the X archive—are, no doubt, interminable. And rather
than grieve this excess and try to grasp toward some kind of arbitration regard-
ing what an archive is or is not, we share a view with Eric Ketelaar, who in his
“Archival Turns and Returns: Studies of the Archive” emphatically proclaims:
“Let anything be ‘as archive’ and let everyone be an archivist. The important
question is not ‘what is an archive’ but how does this particular individual or
group perceive and understand an archive?”21 Ketelaar discusses the archival
turn as characterized by acknowledging archives as subjects of study: How is
Introduction · 7
it that we might come to know archives as “things”? How archives have come
to be known as queer t hings is a key question for the authors whose chapters
we include here. Ketelaar considers a range of archival turns—linguistic, social,
performative, representational, and so on—and his discussion of the archival
turn as having produced archives as “things” with “agency” brings up the condi-
tions under which archival agency itself is produced and made legible. Explic
itly tied to broader regimes of power governing the context within which any
archival endeavor emerges, “archival agency” is necessarily shaped by the cul-
tural politics pertinent to an archive’s collection and situation, suggesting how
queer archival agency is freighted with specific historical contests in relation to
authority, gender, and sexuality more generally. Similarly, Ketelaar’s observa-
tion that the archival turn has been characterized by a turn to the body—such
as in his discussion of reenactments and embodiment—invites further reflec-
tion on the particular significance of this development from a queer perspec-
tive.22 Queer bodies have, of course, been subjected to unique and complex
histories of erasure, regulation, modification, and amplification in the archives.
Indeed, an enduring imperative of queer archival work has been to challenge
and reconfigure the terms under which bodies and their desires have archival
existences. The importance of the body and practices of archival embodiment
that Ketelaar observes as being central to the archival turn have added signifi-
cance when that turn goes queer.
Turning Archival emerges out of a series of long-running conversations
with people working in and outside of queer archive studies, which is reflected
partly in our prior coediting of two special issues of Radical History Review on
“Queering Archives” (see articles by archivists including Rebecka Taves Shef-
field, Peter Edelberg, and others). Archival science and library studies scholars
have been at the forefront of exploring the implications of the increased preser-
vation and conservation of lgbtq materials, and some of the most important
interdisciplinary queer studies work on archives is directly indebted to library
and information studies. See, for instance, recent scholarship by those whose
earlier work appeared in our Radical History Review issues, including Robb
Hernández’s Archiving an Epidemic: Art, aids, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-
Garde; Cait McKinney’s Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian
Media Technologies; and Rebecka Taves Sheffield’s Documenting Rebellions: A
Study of Four Lesbian and Gay Archives in Queer Times, among others.23 Turn-
ing Archival has strategically assembled a group of humanities scholars at the
intersection of queer studies and disciplinary boundaries, working on a range
of temporal and geopolitical contexts. In their own ways the chapters trace the
career of the queer archival turn in humanities scholarship (especially queer
studies and gender/sexuality studies) and serve as a companion piece to the
expanding field of queer archives scholarship in library and information stud-
ies.24 In Turning Archival we are foregrounding these turns between, among,
and t oward the multiple disciplines constituting queer archive studies not only
as performative turns through which the subjects of our analysis are produced,
but as hopeful turns toward further transdisciplinary collaboration.
*
Histories of lgbtq archiving are enmeshed in overlapping histories of activ-
ism, research, and theoretical work that has sought to examine experiences of
difference, especially in terms of class, race, and citizenship status as they inter-
sect with gender and sexuality. Queer archive studies—and archive studies in
general—is indebted to much longer histories of scholarship examining rac-
ism, slavery, colonialism, class injustice, and migration. As McKemmish and
Gilliland observe, the archive-oriented critical theory that has emerged over
the past half-century has developed techniques “for theorizing about both the
role of the Archive in social conditions and forces such as colonialism, oppres-
sion, marginalization and abuse of human rights, and the part that it might
play in postcolonial, post-trauma and post-conflict societies.”25 It is in this crit-
ical tradition of paying attention to questions of history and power, and insti-
tutions and their subjects, that turning archival is framed as a critical posture
that invites us to more carefully attend to the ways in which archives are not
only situated within the context of the cultural politics of gender and sexuality,
but also how knowledges generated through turning to the archive play active
roles in these political struggles.
Born first from liberation-era struggles to turn away from histories of omis-
sion, queer archiving gained its footing by making a stand on the grounds of
evidence—that gender and sexual difference had left historical traces and the
renegade preservation of the dissident historical knowledge such traces in-
formed could be the basis for new ways to recognize the past and set the terms
for a desirable future. Despite these early affirmations of the political power
of documented proof of historical sexual and gender difference, the question
of evidence has, of course, always been controversial in histories and cultural
politics of gender and sexual difference. This is largely because the idea of ev-
idence has so often been used so powerfully against women and queers, espe-
cially Indigenous p eople and people of color, working-class communities, and
those with disabilities. These troubling histories mean that appealing in any
straightforward way to the merits of evidence risks incorporation within those
historical and often juridical structures of power that have policed and regu-
lated queer life in both the past and the present. Queer critique thus must stay
Introduction · 9
alert to the diverse and often nefarious ways in which evidence has been mobi-
lized against queers, and this speaks to the political importance of examining
the performative work of turning sexual and gender difference into archival
evidence that this book explores. Such analyses can ultimately help expose, in
the words of Marisa J. Fuentes, both “the machinations of archival power” and
the ways that the archive always “conceals, distorts, and silences as much as it
reveals.”26
Put simply, queer archive studies is a struggle against reading evidence
straight, not least because the very idioms and institutions for the production
of archival knowledge continue to be so deeply enmeshed in colonial matrices
of value, authority, access, and power. As Ann Cvetkovich oberves, so many
“foundational texts for the archival turn predate queer theory” and many of
these texts—from Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to Michel-
Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History—are
grounded in the epistemological and political concerns of postcolonial cri-
tique (and the lingering aftereffects of empire).27 More than a diffuse desire
to turn extant understandings of archives into something else by replacing
them with a more or less benign, banal kind of poststructuralist proliferation,
decolonizing queer critiques of the archive and archival practice seek to alter
the idiom through which the subjects of the archive are constructed as part of
broader anticolonial political struggles. As Anjali Arondekar observes in this vol-
ume, concerns with reading queer pasts “are especially pressing for the lives of
sexual minorities as the legal and economic right to be h ere and now is often
authorized by the evidence of histories past.” The legacies of the complicity of
colonial archives in turning diverse subjects around the world into racialized,
sexualized, and gendered others endure in marked and umarked ways today.
As lgbtq archiving achieves increased state sponsorship in different national
contexts, more and more questions are being asked about the implications of
turning state histories into lgbtq histories and vice versa. The tracing of the
diverse functions and effects of these “turns”—as both rhetorical expressions
and epistemological practices—helps to illustrate some of the ways that the
queer archival turn has given shape to contemporary racialized understandings
of sex, gender, sexuality, and archives while also generating a site for turning the
queer archival turn to reflect on its own histories and complicities and examine
the colonial contours of its own desires and discoveries.
By turning to reflect on the queer archival turn itself, this collection reflects
on the terms and practices through which sex, gender, and sexuality are under-
stood as having turned archival. This critical reflection can guide us away, we
hope, from an earnest and straightforward celebration of the “queer archive”
and toward a more expansive consideration of the productivity of the queer
archival turn itself. As the queer archival turn considers its mirrors—and its
mirages—what comes into focus is how the queer archival turn produces its var-
ied forms of knowledge, and, enticingly, we also catch glimpses of assemblies of
queerness and the archival that diverge from the disciplinary motions, tempo-
ralities, and spatialities that have been enforced through normative practices
of turns and turning. In t hese ways, the works presented h ere seek to diver-
sify relationships between archives, gender, and sexuality while also critically
reflecting on how time and again, the cultural politics of gender and sexuality
have turned to archives to harness their knowledge-producing power within often
tightly confined knowledge pursuits. The explorations in this book, then, might
be thought of as experiments or explorations in mapping out what we might call
a postarchival tendency in queer and feminist studies—explorations in the life
of the historical in feminist and queer studies in the wake of the archival turn—
and one that contributes to other scholarly efforts to reflect on the productive
work of the historical, methodological, political, and personal injunction to
turn to the queer archive.28 The chapters h ere take turns at working through
the turn to the archival in queer and feminist studies as means to explore di-
verse ways of engaging historical knowledge and experience in contemporary
cultural politics of gender and sexuality. And the turns engaged and performed
by each chapter give body to, and flesh out, different visions of what turning
archival looks like.
Seeking to press against the disciplined expectation to turn to the archive
in normative ways, the feminist and queer scholarship in this book digs deeper
into links between ideas of feeling and motion, which often mobilize relations
between the archival and gender and sexuality. The turn to the archive in queer
studies has often been examined as so many practices of emotion and affect,
and what interests us h ere is the importance of ideas about motion and move-
ment to affective engagements with the archive—a relationship that a critical
reflection on archival turns helps bring into focus. Anecdotally, it is common
to remark on how one is “moved” by a turn to the archive—moved by expe-
riences of witnessing historical lives and events that invoke a diverse array of
feelings from horror to admiration and pleasure to fear. The messiness of emo-
tional movements denoted by the queer archival turn means that any analysis
of the productivity of turning to the archive cannot be bound to any conclusive,
straightforward feeling—every moment of archival pride is shadowed by archi-
val shame. This proliferation of archival feelings is symptomatic of the perfor-
mativity of turning archival. By exploring multiple ways in which the turn to
the archive is generative, producing multiple coexisting forms of knowledge
Introduction · 11
that rub up against each other, we can recall Sedgwick’s theorization of the per-
formativity of “thinking beside” (as opposed to “thinking beyond”) in Touching
Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity.29 Here, Sedgwick extends her theoriza-
tion of performativity in Epistemology of the Closet, which she presented as a
theoretical alternative to critical accounts that believed in the conclusive turn
represented by the idea of a “great paradigm shift” (as illustrated, for example,
by apparently contrasting critical discussions about “homosexuality today”).30
In other words, our focus h ere is not the destination, or final significance, of
any given turn, but rather a reflection on the pluralizing epistemologies and
embodiments that are generated by frictive archival turns when understood as
performative motions of change and transformation.
As the historical deployment of a language of “movement” reminds us, from
the w
omen’s movement to the Black Lives Matter movement and beyond, his-
tories of sexual and gender difference have often made explicit how emotion is
constituted, in part, by motion itself. And if we examine the motions contained
within the emotion of the archival turn, we can reflect on how the union be-
tween the archival and gender and sexual difference has been sharply s haped
by ideas about turning as a regulated form of motion. By exploring how the
motion of turning disciplines the way that the archival is thought about and
practiced from the perspective of gender and sexuality studies and politics, we
might better be able to understand the enduring power of thinking about en-
gagements with the archive through a rhetoric of turns, and thus sponsor less
regulated forms of engagement between archives, gender and sexuality, and
subsequent knowledge production. Turning Archival seeks to denaturalize the
relationship between feminist and queer studies and the archives by turning to
explore some of the implications of this turning work itself. How do objects get
materially and discursively altered once they are turned into a given archive? How
have different meanings and authorities been produced for feminist/lgbtq
research, politics, and researchers by the turn to the archive? Relatedly, how
has the archival turn helped us move away from problematic notions of the
historical as authentic and authorizing in particularly self-legitimizing ways?
*
Turning Archival focuses on the significance of the very act of turning, rather
than the idea of the queer archival turn as some kind of discrete historical pe-
riod or event. Sara Ahmed asks us to reflect on what “we could call ‘the politics
of turning’ (and turning around), and how in facing this way or that the surfaces
of bodies and worlds take their shape.”31 Certainly, how some historical subjects
do (or do not) become “archival” is itself a reflection of how bodies and desires
take shape in relation to archival technologies of conservation, reproduction,
and dissemination. Turning thus partly constitutes, and partly unfixes, each
and every archival subject, as the following chapters demonstrate. E very turn
to the archive is a witnessing of the archive turning into something e lse, and
that something else can often be nothing at all, with the degradation of archival
materials reminding us of how the turn to immateriality is the immanent ghost
of the material archive. While the archive, in the words of Francis X. Blouin Jr.
and William G. Rosenberg, is “a place of imagined and unexpected possibil-
ities,” it is also a place where the inevitable destruction of material records is
slowed down (through processes of conservation).32
This emphasis on archival loss in the queer archival turn means that the histor-
ical project imagined within its terms has often fixated on the limits of historical
knowledge, generating influential insights into historical erasure as well as the
problematic reproduction of methodological and political assumptions about
historical invisibility. More generatively, the emphasis on the ephemerality of
queerness has meant that queer archive studies has drawn attention to the elu-
siveness of many queer historical knowledges, identifying how such knowledge
has often been historically expressed through knowledge systems that have not
been decipherable to all (e.g., work in queer Indigenous studies and decolo-
nizing approaches emphasize these observations more forcefully; also, other
work by people like Samuel Steward illustrate the historical development of
approaches to the preservation of queer knowledge which often included spe-
cific barriers to access).33 Thus the queer turn in archival studies, building on
Muñoz and others, has emphasized the ephemerality of gendered and sexual
life, demonstrating how contemporary understandings of histories of sexual
and gender difference as histories comprised of fragments have been shaped
by the patterning motion of the archive as a place one turns to for piecing to-
gether something that is presumed from the outset to be broken and retriev-
able, at least in part, but only piece by piece. What it also emphasizes is the way
in which archives in general are queer because ephemerality has been queered
(that is, structured by knowledges of queerness) through the emphasis on
queerness as signifying an epistemological gap or pregnant absence. Queer as a
critical approach has helped to give sense to the ephemerality of archives, and
as all archives are systems spanning different expressions of lack, all archives
become sites of queer potential. In short, the queer archival turn has helped to
bring archives studies within a register of desire.
Since the advent of the archival turn in queer studies, the intense relation-
ship between queer studies and archive studies has turned on this notion of
turning. Taking Ahmed’s method of confronting an idea’s persistence by fol-
lowing it around, the queer archival turn invites similar reflection on the work
Introduction · 13
that the idea of turning is performing, not least b ecause the recession of that
moment into the recent past means that addressing it requires a different type
of turn in attention.34 Turning to the queer archival turn as an object of cu-
riosity, a historical moment, a critical and methodological tendency within a
nested set of intersecting fields of intellectual inquiry, yields a variety of gen-
erative propositions. Why, for instance, does the idea of turning bridge under-
standings of the queer and the archival? Certainly, the emphasis on historical
scholarship in North American gay and lesbian studies of the 1970s and 1980s is
one explanation for this powerful association, reflecting as it does how studies of
homosexuality turned to historical methods and knowledges to consolidate and
grow themselves. Indeed, the profound influence of disagreements between
essentialist and social constructionist positions throughout the 1980s under-
lines how studies of sexuality have been shaped by an apparently inexhaustible
project of returning, again and again, to some e arlier historical point or figure
so that it might be interrogated for the sexual and gendered evidence it could
manifest.
This repetitive return to the historical as constitutive of foundational gay and
lesbian studies is, of course, only one of the ways that can help us think about the
success of “turning” as a way of framing the relationship between “queer” and
“archive.” While returning to this or that moment of history points to the ways in
which the importance of history to queer studies has been largely understood
in terms of history’s exteriority, that is, queer studies’ relationship to history as
a set of external happenings, what the idea of “returns” also speaks to is the way
in which the relationship between “queer” and “archives” has been character-
ized by understandings of the archive as a space where historical knowledges
return something in an interior or internalized way—such as an affirmation of
identity—to the queer subject in the archive. This diversity of turns reminds
us of the variety of meanings suggested by the term discussed earlier in this
introduction. Turning is a powerful idea because the action of pivoting that
underpins it suggests change across a variety of scales and registers: a change in
how we understand the past, a change in how we understand the self, changes
within and without. It is little wonder then that the queer and the archival have
been yoked together by a concept so centrally concentrated on reinvention and
the plurality of meaning given the fashioning of both queer cultural politics
and archival endeavors as projects focusing on the production of new knowl-
edge and experience.
This abiding queerness of archives is observable in the ways in which archival
materials are deployed to illustrate queer historical presence. Powerfully, queer
archive studies asks questions of how gender and sexual difference manifest in
the historical archive. We are asked to look at the precise ways in which both
queerness and the archival are put to work to illustrate each other. How, in
the mechanics of archival apprehension and analysis, are illustrations of gender
and sexual difference composed? A study of this question of the illustrative
turn—the illustration of queer presence in the archives—reveals how under-
standings of queerness and the archive are stitched together. As Cvetkovich
writes, “Ephemeral objects have that power—gesturing to affective meanings
that are attached to objects but not fully present in them, while also making
immaterial ephemeralities material.”35 In this way archival objects are deeply
generative, helping to materialize “immaterial ephemeralities”—it is through
the queer archive that certain expressions of queer life find an expression or
realization that would otherwise remain elusive. In other words, it is only by
turning archival that certain forms of queer life become knowable and possi
ble. The critical impulse encourages us to tug on those tight stitches marked by
the hyphenation of the “queer-archival”: by picking at those stitches we learn
more about the production of queerness itself which is so often stitched up by
turning to the archive.
By turning to the ways in which the archival turn is queered through its ex-
pression across feminist and queer archives, we can explore how queerness gets
constituted through processes of “turning archival” while simultaneously queer-
ing what such turns mean. As feminist and queer historians have demonstrated,
queer and feminist history has historically been structured by the absent pres-
ence of sexual and gendered difference. What turns up in the archive, then, is
also a queer question because it raises questions beyond the mere appearance
of something in the archive, asking us to think about histories of acquisition,
power, loss, and production behind such appearance. If the queer archive is
often understood through its emphasis on the contingency, instability, and
ephemeral nature of archival material, it is also understood as a place in which
meanings and histories are often made concrete, stable, and real. The rationale
for many feminist and gay and lesbian archives emerging from the 1970s was to
create a historical repository that would bear witness to the reality of people’s
lives: we are here (to take the title of a 2018 exhibition drawing on the col-
lection of the Australian Queer [then Lesbian and Gay] Archives).36 That the
queer archive is often characterized by such deeply held affective and political
attachments dramatizes the queer archival turn in unique ways—the queer ar-
chival turn is often about queer people turning to the archive, seeking out in
the archive others who are themselves. It is thus a turning outward as a way of
turning in. The queer archival turn has often been a turn to the past as future-
building practice. That many p eople have a lot at stake in the queer archival
Introduction · 15
project freights the work of turning with a g reat deal of political and personal
significance and is a key reason why the archival turn has had such a prominent
career in the rise of contemporary queer studies over the past four decades.
That the queer archival turn might be said to have multiple diff erent starting
points, or what we might call hinge moments, is only fitting in the context of
queer studies where the ideas of teleological development and universal para-
digm shifts have been problematized by scholars pointing to the performative
interplay of multiple simultaneous epistemological formations: turns beside
turns, to recall our discussion of Sedgwick earlier. Besides, then, straight histo-
ries of the queer archival turn that might posit the turn as happening at some
static historical point in time, this collection meditates on the evasive allure of
turns, and how different accounts of them function generatively. It encourages
us to critically reflect on the work of turning, and what might make it attractive
in the first place. Like turning over a new page, the idea of the archival turn has
often carried with it the allure of the new, suggesting that a turn t oward the
archives signals a turn away from an older, deficient approach. The pleasures
produced by this rhetorical formulation are illustrative of some of the seductive
power of turning archival. A postarchival approach to t hese questions brings
these archiving pleasures within our critical view for analysis and exploration.
This turn to archiving pleasures was, a fter all, in many ways a key starting
point for this book, growing as it did out of e arlier work Daniel Marshall
conducted with Joan Nestle, the author of the coda for this collection, and
explored as it was in previously mentioned special issues of Radical History
Review on “Queering Archives” that we coedited with Kevin P. Murphy. In
this earlier work we sought to think through some of the reasons relation-
ships between queers and archives can often be so sticky and the emotions
of turning so messy. This guided us to reflect more deeply on how desire and
pleasure get produced through turning archival, and this in turn turned us to
think more about turning itself, recalling our etymological gloss from e arlier:
to go this way or that, to come and to go, to be turned and worked on as if in a
carpenter’s hand, to rotate with friction, to be as a “place of bending,” to rub, drill,
pierce, and twist. With Sedgwick in mind, her theorization of performativity
as diverse models of knowledge rubbing as they coexist “beside” each other
offers a useful way to entertain all this “heat” produced by the interactions of
so many diverse knowledge formations. Maybe turning archival turns p eople
on through so much shared performative burn, like flesh heated up when a
fabric twists against it just quickly enough. Wanting to place frictive engage-
ments with the queer archival turn side by side, this collection has assembled a
promiscuous movement between disciplines, theorists, and periods, collecting
together diverse pieces to rub against each other, to turn against each other,
and to produce that friction burn of queer significance and queer desire, helping
us to rethink how gender, sexuality, and the archive are s haped, felt, and lived
by the constant urge to turn.
*
The fecundity of the “turn” as a productive set of motions within queer studies
is illustrated in Turning Archival by the diverse ways in which the historical has
been put to work in queer studies across a range of contexts in North America,
Latin America, South Asia, Africa, and Europe. Invoking the mercurial char-
acter of turning archival, this collection opens with a meditation on the theme
of lost-and-found in two paired chapters, respectively by María Elena Martínez
(“Archives, Bodies, and Imagination”) and Zeb Tortorici (“Decolonial Archival
Imaginaries”), which illustrate one archival turn in particular: the loss and subse-
quent turning up of Juana Aguilar in the Archivo General de Centro América.
Martínez’s chapter—written in 2013, shortly before her death—is coupled with
a recent chapter by Tortorici that offers a particular type of return to Guate-
mala’s colonial archives. Martínez offers a reflection on how disciplinary and
classificatory regimes within historical and archival scholarship routinely sup-
press queer archival knowledge, focusing on one archival document in partic
ular: the 1803 medical report published by the male surgeon who probed the
body parts of Aguilar, a suspected “hermaphrodite” (in the language of early
nineteenth-century criminal courts and medical reports) who was tried by the
Royal Court in colonial Guatemala. Responding to the (then) archival absence
of the original criminal trial transcripts, Martínez uses performance studies to
move beyond traditional historical methodologies and reimagine lost archival
knowledges. Yet as Tortorici asks, what happens when the long-lost records
unexpectedly turn up in the archives?
Sometime in 2012, Sylvia Sellers-García, historian of colonial Guatemala,
came across a card catalog descriptor of Aguilar’s trial transcripts in the Guate-
malan national archives—a fact that was unbeknownst to Martínez, Tortorici,
and other historians who had previously looked for them, to no avail. Tortorici’s
chapter reflects on this peculiar, though not uncommon, archival twist, fo-
cusing his analysis on what happens when much desired missing archival
documents—and the historical subject within—are suddenly uncovered, found
again, and then filtered through the public sphere. Tortorici shows, despite hav-
ing finally “found” Aguilar in the archives, the narratives we spin about them
can still be just as imaginary as those written and performed prior to when the
transcripts surfaced. If t hese documents do bring us any closer to Aguilar, they
do so partly (and paradoxically) through negation—that is, through Juana’s
Introduction · 17
own embodied evasions of the medical and colonial bureaucratic incursions
into their body and life. Yet the new details we learn about their life allow, at
the same time, for a more nuanced microhistorical image of a fascinating his-
torical figure, about whom we may one day yet know more.
Scholars of colonialism, slavery, and sexuality have long been attentive to
archival economies of loss, paucity, and devaluation, turning the “archival trace”
into the preferred value form through which sexuality’s pasts accrue meaning. In
“Telling Tales,” Anjali Arondekar calls for scholars working on the history of
sexuality to be attentive to how “archival consumption and dissemination” un-
fold in relation to minoritized historiographies, including how they privilege
rhetorics of loss and recovery. Arondekar expands on the problematic signifi-
cance of loss, rarity, or absence for queer archive studies by illustrating some
of the implications when the lost object in the queer archive gets found, and
when the lure of absence which has enticed queer archive studies for so long is
overwhelmed by plenitude. Arondekar asks what makes something an archival
event/situation as opposed to a mere gestural instance or example, and why
does the history of sexuality take on particular narrative forms? The task h
ere is
to treat the archival trace as other than something that might allow for histori-
cal recuperation or stabilization. In Arondekar’s chapter we glimpse such a turn
to the hermeneutical, through the archival trace of the “evil ladies of Girgaum,”
in early twentieth-century South Bombay, where local Indian taxpayers com-
plain to the colonial Commissioner of Police about the growing presence of
“common prostitutes” in nearby buildings and rented rooms. Both sides argue
about the in/visibilty of the problem, leading Arondekar to show how the ar-
chival trace becomes “laden with the challenges and possibilities of historical
visibility,” and always imbued with fantasies of value/capital that come to be
implicit in the very form of the archival trace itself. This archival turn t oward
capital, value, and worth is one that we find both within archival documents
themselves and in their materiality (leading us to think, for example, about
which archives purchase which collections, and through what means). The
“evil ladies” of Girgaum are, as Arondekar shows, representationally and archi-
vally tied to “their corruption of the family form as value,” and herein lies part
of their queer nature, always caught between the real and apparent—caught
within archival representations, among the traces, in other words.
Carrying these reflections on the affordances and constraints of institu-
tionalized archiving in a different direction, Ann Cvetkovich—whose book
An Archive of Feelings was influential in setting in motion the archival turn in
queer studies—turns again to the archives, this time to the June L. Mazer Les-
bian Archives, now h oused at the special collections library at the University
of California, Los Angeles.37 In “Ordinary Lesbians and Special Collections,”
Cvetkovich explores what happens when grassroots lesbian feminist archives
are brought into major university research libraries, turning both things into
something different along the way. Recounting her intimate, archivally medi-
ated contact with the once private epistolary exchanges between June Mazer
and her lover Bunny MacCulloch, Cvetkovich describes breathing in “a queer
form of archival dust,” gesturing toward Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive
and Cultural History, in which the author meditates in part on historians and
archivists breathing in “the dust of the dead.”38 When the lesbian archive enters
the institution, or the dusty archival glitter gets breathed in by the archive vis-
itor, what do they turn into? Throughout this chapter, Cvetkovich reflects on
how turning to or being turned into the archive has transformative effects. For
example, when archival materials literally refuse to “fit into a box,” Cvetkovich
gestures toward the ways in which this experience of not fitting in—a common
queer turn if t here ever was one—alters the significance of both institutional
archival space as well as the status of the archived t hing. (And remember, the
original etymological roots of “turn” gesture toward rotation, trying to get ob-
jects to fit with each other.) Similar to a proposal to donate water from a gay
sauna that was closing down to the Australian Queer Archives (AQuA), mate-
rials evidencing queer historical lives can be misfits, as in Cvetkovich’s illustra-
tion, or leaky, to use the AQuA example, risking not only escape from proper
archival collection but threatening its very order and preservation. And it is
the productivity of this immanent threat to normative archival order posed by
queer historical life that is foregrounded in Cvetkovich’s chapter. Cvetkovich
conjures up an image of “animated” archival materials jostling against their ar-
chival ordering, recalling the state-altering sense of the term turn discussed at
the start of this chapter: queer archives so often invite us to think of them as
archives “taking a turn”; convulsing, as if having a fit, the objects agitate. What
could make more sense for archives built, as they so often are, on the preserva-
tion of histories of malady and pathology, and rage and protest? Indeed, yet
undead, queer archives are animate, alive, bearing “traces of the flesh and blood
pulse of both the people in the archives and the cataloguers.”
Following Cvetkovich’s chapter, Javier Fernández- Galeano (“Performing
Queer Archives”) extends this meditation on visiting queer archives through a
reflection on his own experiences as a researcher in police archives—specifically,
the Instituto de Clasificación, now h oused in Argentina’s Penitentiary Museum
Antonio Ballvé—researching so-called deviant sexual activities. There, given
that no photographs of written transcriptions were permitted, the author had
to record himself reading archival documents out loud in order to make a copy
Introduction · 19
of them. Reflecting on his experiences of reading out prisoners’ responses to
psychological tests, in front of the archival authorities, Fernández-Galeano
theorizes the performance of archival sources as a generative archival method
arguing that “the performance of dissonant voices” enables us to “better appre-
ciate ambivalence in the face of surveillance.” As becomes clear, ambivalence—
the resistance to easy scrutiny—forms a key part of queer (archival) survival:
The best thing . . . I never say;
What hurts me . . . I don’t show;
In secret . . . nothing.
Lo mejor . . . nunca lo digo
Lo que me duele . . . No lo demuestro
En secreto . . . nada.
Taking turns as both researcher and as the archival subject u nder scrutiny,
Fernández-Galeano identifies how queer archival work is often propelled by
ambiguous, pulsing turns flicking from guilt to desire and back again: between
“the guilt that I feel for using sources that are the direct result of state vio
lence” and “my desire to access the stories that they contain” lies a complicated
archiving pleasure linked to what Emmett Harsin Drager describes as the “fu-
gitivity” of the queer past.
In “Looking After Mrs. G,” Harsin Drager extends this cultivation of a
counterpathologizing, anti-authoritarian turn to the archive by focusing on
the medical gaze at university-based clinics of the 1960s and 1970s through
a study of the Robert J. Stoller Papers (also housed at the ucla special col-
lections library). This chapter advances Turning Archival’s reflections on the
complex way in which the queer archival turn has been shaped by simultaneous
attempts to turn outward to the archive as part of a technology of the self, a
way to turn more into one’s self: “We look in order to be found.” Troubling
this kind of straightforward turn to the archive, Harsin Drager second-g uesses
the merits of seeking out the transsexual traces in archival clinical cases as a po
litical methodology for inverting historical logics of transsexual pathologizing
because what this approach actually requires is a renewal of the historical injury
of subjecting gender diverse subjects to archival scrutiny. The chapter turns the
critical gaze on Stoller, the archived clinician himself, embracing this kind of
queer archival inversion. The power of the clinician is thus wrapped up with both
therapeutic and archival authority. Gesturing toward “a queer ethics of looking

after rather than looking for,” Harsin Drager turns t oward an ethics of turning
away, of accepting that queer life may sometimes require not archival preserva-
tion of its traces, but archival loss.
Building on such discussion of archives as urgent sites of reckoning with
unfreedom in the present, Elliot James, in “Naming Afrika’s Archive ‘Queer Pan-
Africanism,’” relates their earliest experiences of archival research—and of uncov-
ering deep-seated histories of anti-black racial violence in their college town—at
the Northfield Historical Society in the Midwest of the United States. Building
on and contributing to other queer Africa-based scholars’ conceptualizations of
Afrika—with a “k”—as a politicized cultural space that cuts across rigid geopo
litical (often ex-colonial) borders, James fashions the queer archival turn as a
movement for cultivating the decolonization of sex, gender, and sexuality. The
decolonizing archive then becomes more a set of shared social relations and
experiences than a “depository of documents,”39 to recall an earlier formula-
tion, and one founded on the political and pedagogical power of recognizing
Afrikan transnational solidarities across continents and oceans, partly medi-
ated by the specter of slavery. Through a retrospective narration of a series of
live events, James begins to map out what an archive of queer Pan-Africanism
might look like, and how such an archive might be assembled within a cultural
politics of resistance that links the contemporary moment to the historical ef-
forts of activist “ancestors.” Through this activist deployment of the notion of
ancestry, James reflects on how the queer archival turn might be regarded as a
movement, then, not only because of what and whom it moves, but because
of t hose relations that move through it, back and forth across time, calling up
future ghosts of queer, decolonized hope.
As time-spaces in which histories get handed on and as places where the eth-
ics of how such histories get handled can come sharply into focus, archives are
often places that get understood through a language of hands. That each archive
requires the work of many hands reminds us that turning archival entails a cul-
tural politics of handling and handing around, in more or less sophisticated
ways. Daniel Marshall, in “Secondhand Cultures, Ephemeral Erotics, and
Queer Reproduction,” picks up this rhetoric of hands—firsthand, second
hand—to think through some of the implications of the circulation of objects
among a diversity of handlers. Following Ahmed’s methodological encour-
agement to follow “turning” around, we come across so many different hands;
it seems “handy” to think about the archival turn in terms of hands not only
because turning seems often to rely on hands but because turning to the lan-
guage of hands tends to help us h andle the subject of the archive. Eichhorn
illustrates this in her invocation of a popular conception of the archive as a
Introduction · 21
space “in which to locate myself in histories I never experienced firsthand.” Theo-
rizing archives through an epistemological framework of firsthand, secondhand,
and the installation or restitution of significance in ephemeral objects through
processes of object circulation, Marshall reflects on secondhand record col-
lecting to think about how historical queerness becomes understood through
people’s relationships to objects. Taking the movement of secondhand David
Bowie records from user to user, the traveling Bowie archive and the circula-
tion of public feelings in the wake of Bowie’s death as illustrative moments,
Marshall develops discussions about what queer chains of inheritance might
look like through theorizations of the secondhand and, relatedly, how these
things might help us deepen understandings of relationships between archival
materials and the enacted cultural life of queer legacies. Examining how objects
get turned into diff erent things through the various ways they are handled over
time, Marshall offers a reading of queer archival engagements in terms of queer
reproduction, where turning archival and all its sordid relations between first
and second hands function as movements to proliferate queerness.
Providing an elaboration of secondhand cultures and diverse modes of cul-
tural and economic (re)production and circulation, Iván A. Ramos turns to the
archival implications of punk, in its political and artistic manifestations, in late
twentieth-century Mexico City, by linking piracy, imaginatively illicit repro-
duction, and questions of access to remixed forms of cultural production. In
“Pirates and Punks,” bootlegging (for many of the artists discussed) is an inher-
ently archival practice—one that resonates with diy forms of feminist cultural
production discussed by both Eichhorn and Cvetkovich here as well—because
it “attempts to leave its own traces scattered as unfaithful remnants of what
once was.” For Ramos this longing for the i magined purity of an archival “once
was” (made necessarily irretrievable by conflicting experiences and expressions
of historical and contemporary desire and representation) shapes the archival
turn as a recognition of “not having been there.” That queer engagements with
the archive foreground the failure to ever r eally arrive in a firsthand sense to
“once was” moments renders queerness as something which is always partly
out of reach, and Ramos links this to a propulsion toward queer futures based
on the elusiveness of queerness, as we see in the work of José Esteban Muñoz
in Cruising Utopia. Of course, such valorizations of queerness as incomplete
and ephemeral find their natural expression through archival materials and
practices because incompletion and elusion flood archives and queerness alike.
Finding signs of queer life in the imperfect record, Ramos’s exploration of the
bootleg archive returns to concerns raised e arlier in the collection about what

happens when lgbtq materials get turned into institutional collections, a
theme that is shared throughout many of the chapters in Turning Archival.
In “Unfixed,” Kate Clark and David Serlin critically situate t hese discussions
about object circulation and queer significance within the urgent context of queer
crip archive studies. “Unfixing” archival objects from their lodgment within his-
tories built around desires for normative models of bodies and desires, Clark
and Serlin work through the roles that t hese “queer” objects have had in co-
producing forms of disabled subjectivity, while excavating promise from the
painful histories of what they describe as a “disappeared aesthetics.” Recall-
ing the counterpathologizing maneuvers that characterize the queer archival
turn for Fernández-Galeano and Harsin Drager, Clark and Serlin turn back
to objects lodged in therapeutic histories in order to extract them through the
force of their own theoretical reframing. One example of this is the work they
perform recontextualizing historical wartime bandages that had been “used
and destroyed” before they could be preserved as artifacts in a “disappeared”
queer crip archive. Recalling Marshall’s reflections on secondhand object cir-
culation, Clark and Serlin invoke the image of “the material circulation of the
bandage on the battlefield as it moves between the hands of soldiers trained
for warfare but not for welfare” to bring it within the purview of the queer
crip archival, arguing that it indexes not “sexual practices” but “new forms of
same-sex intimacy and socialization” forged “on the battlefield in the intimate
skills of triage.” The work of “unfixing” advocated by the authors—the work
of decontextualizing archival objects from normative archival lodgment and
recontextualizing them within an analytical framework that intersects queer
and crip investments in the historical—involves a kind of archival labor which
the authors allegorize through reference to the figure of the nursing soldier in
triage. Archival unfixing emerges, then, in a queer turn and allegorized in the
care work of triage, as a way to try to fix archival injury, to tend archival wounds
and work for historical healing.
Opening this introduction, we reflected on the etymology of the turn, and
read in its promise of rubbing and grinding, drilling and twisting, a kind of
Sedgwickean performativity, where Clark and Serlin’s renegade appropriations
of objects into a queer crip archive generate new, suggestive archival knowl-
edges that rub up beside those fostered by the normative historical knowl-
edges within which such objects have previously been “disappeared.” With the
“intimacy and industriousness” of the soldier’s triage work both as an object
of their analysis (insofar as such care work is residualized in the archival ban
dage) and as an analogy for their method, Clark and Serlin’s queer archival
Introduction · 23
turn inverts the norm-work of historical therapeutics, displacing it with the
critical care work of a contemporary politics of archival un/fixing. The queer
archival turn is thus rendered in urgent terms, with the friction produced by
proliferating knowledges manifesting in every sense a struggle, a struggle for
non-normative life made material at the site of the archive itself, and a strug
gle that sponsors the question: How might we all best nurse the archives we
inherit? How might we tend to a world so that it might be fit to care for the
queer histories it inherits?
As is clear in Clark and Serlin’s discussion of the queer archive as an archive
of “the thrown away” and “the cast off,” and in Arondekar and Marshall, the
queerness of archives links tightly to the ways in which t hese archival practices
challenge normative understandings of archival value. In “An Archival Life,”
Martin F. Manalansan provides a different kind of reflection on what Clark
and Serlin describe as the “queerness of detritus” in his reflection on archives
as lived phenomena, explored through extended ethnographic research with
members of queer undocumented immigrants’ households in New York City.
Through thick description, Manalansan offers analytical reflections of his
fieldwork conducted between 2003 and 2012 as “a queer take on ‘dwelling in
the archives’ as the quotidian becomes the fuel for animating capacious engage-
ments with queer undocumented immigrants as ‘impossible subjects’ of his-
tory.” For Manalansan, queer experience can be indexed in part through what
he terms “archival life,” where people’s lives are saturated with everyday t hings
that mark their contemporary situation and their historical traces as racialized
subjects living under racist governance structures. Detached from institutions
and enacted in the personal space of the home, t hese queer archives turn nor-
mative understandings of archives inside out as they refuse routine distinctions
between public and private, institutional and personal, and exterior and inte-
rior. Focusing on the “stuff ” that makes up the “archival life” of queer migrants,
Manalansan traces a shifting set of practices of collecting and caring, placement
and displacement, acquisition and loss. These documented accounts perform
their own archiving work, collecting and preserving entangled and messy in-
timacies between space, time, objects, and p eople as a record of archival life
amid a crisis in citizenship—crises that have only been exacerbated by the
recent growth of alt-right and fascist ideologies around the globe (and the on-
going elections of right-wing populist leaders that do their best to curtail the
rights of immigrants and turn nativist sentiments against them, often regard-
less of immigrants’ own legal status). Through turning to this mode of dwelling
in history, Manalansan offers a meditation on archival ecologies of affective

events, atmospheres, and object uses that are “awash in the fluid and ambivalent
forces of modernity,” nationalism, normativity, morality, legality, and pleasure.
As set out at the start of this introduction, one set of critical interests that
gave rise to this book was the desire to reflect on the career of the archival turn
within queer studies. In “Reassessing ‘The Archive’ in Queer Theory,” Kate
Eichhorn turns us back to t hose questions through an examination of the rise
of the archive as a critical trope within largely North American queer theory
and cultural theory. Situating her own work within this historical deployment
while also calling attention to its implications, Eichhorn investigates some
of the ways that queer studies can revise its engagement with the archive by
paying more attention to the specificities of archival labor. Under these terms,
Eichhorn revisits queer people’s involvement in the “recirculation” of archival
materials that promise proximity to histories that can’t be “experienced first-
hand,” asking how queers thus build an understanding of the archive through
such uses. Queers may be “at home in archives,” as per Eichhorn’s contention,
but on what foundations are t hese homes built and occupied? Or, put another
way, under what labor terms have queers been turned into historical evidence
and archives turned into queer resources? Queer studies can revitalize its engage-
ment with archives and archival knowledge, Eichhorn argues, by focusing on the
work of turning—all those hands—and mapping out renewed recognitions of
the ways in which “archives are deeply embedded in power structures” and thus
“engaged in the production of subjects, the conditions of language, and the
possibility of alternative histories and countergenealogies.”
As several chapters demonstrate, the political usefulness of a deconstructed
understanding of the queer archive has rested in large measure on a common
queer experience of queer subjects, users, and knowledges being excluded from
archival collections, and queer archives have often been shaped as responses to
these exclusions. However, as greater attention has been given to the queerness
that has been preserved within archives, the archival turn has been experienced
in more diffuse and often ambivalent ways, as expectations of triumphalist his-
torical discovery have given way to exposure to more diversity and ambiguity.
Indeed, the archival turn in queer studies can be understood as a process of
turning toward and away from a clear sense of what queerness in the archive is,
and what archives themselves are. Like a chimera, established ideas about queer-
ness are often undone by the turn to the archives (just as it is in reverse). Looking
there, the i magined vision of historical queerness often vaporizes—emerging as a
much less stable proposition than beforehand. In “Crocker Land,” Carolyn Din-
shaw and Marget Long take up the notion of turning archival by exploring it as
Introduction · 25
a logic of motion driving queer studies, which they explore through a discus-
sion of the archival pursuit of a mirage, which functions much like an archive:
“It refracts, duplicates, shifts, distorts, expands our vision.” The mirage itself—
not unlike the desires that come to be simultaneously represented within and
obscured by archives and their systems of classification—“shimmers but cannot
be corralled, contained, saved, or stored,” which prompts a rethinking of archi-
val practice “as an ongoing, perpetual revelation.” This invocation recalls the
transformative magic inhering in the turn to the archives that we foregrounded
at the start of this introduction, where the indeterminacy and lability of queer
material in the archives is a specified way to understand the more generalized
performativity of sex, gender, and sexuality. The authors conjure up “our old
friend the mirage” as they reflect on the vagaries of archival sleuthing, and it is
the tenderness of the expression that is moving, for so often, for so many of us,
we have turned to the archives in search of some kind of connection. That this
connection might, as it turns out, be fostered less by what is found when we
turn to the archive and more by involvement in a shared practice of turning, of
searching, of hoping and then troubling what is found, endures as what might
still make archival turns queer.
Starting with the problem of sameness and the desire for something we rec-
ognize, the queerness of archives presents us with difference, ultimately requiring
us to recalibrate the terms of our initial turn or quest in the first place. Turning
to the archive, we are turned into something else ourselves and invited into the
world of the past not b ecause of what we have in common with it but b ecause
of a shared sense of how different we are from it. That our engagements with
archives, as with mirages, might routinely be characterized by elusion and eva-
sion is, as Dinshaw and Long demonstrate, a key part of their value and what
compels us to turn to them, again and again. Perhaps, they suggest, gender and
sexual difference may need to remain at least in some respects unreachable (lost
in the archive) if desire is to be preserved. Does securing gender and sexual
difference in the archive vanish or dilute the desire that animates it? If desire is
understood as a longing, then can desire be preserved—archived—when that
act of preservation necessarily “fixes” the object in place (to recall Clark and
Serlin), effectively diminishing desire through the consummation of archival
“discovery”? In short, does the queer archive freeze the desires it saves in the
act of making them archivable and available? Do the material limits of the
archived thing reduce queerness to the limits of evidence? If queerness is to be
preserved as that which, to use Dinshaw and Long’s words, “beckons, but . . .
can’t ever be reached,” then a key challenge for queer archive studies is to consider

how we might turn to archives without arresting their desire, without making
it necessary to “drain the liveness.”
To bring historical materials within a queer frame of perception, Dinshaw
and Long talk about looking “askew”: discussing one particular image they de-
scribe literally inverting it—and inversion is such a fitting queer turn because
in its punning way it turns us to look back on the histories we inherit. This
reminds us that humor, after all, endures as a necessary archival (e)motion and
one that often carries us through histories marked so often by pain and penalty,
triaging archival injury. Even though each archive is a record of its own losses,
humor might be a fix when queer archive studies has so often been caught up in
its hauntings—a different (e)motion to move us when we get stuck. In finding
the humor in the hurt, in looking askew at the archive, in hunting the ever-
receding mirage, we might turn to the queer archive not to repair its losses but,
as Dinshaw and Long argue, to “value the unsaveable.” Such work involves a
turning away from an “expansionist” or incorporative approach that has too
often sought to assimilate the archival into preexisting knowledges, categories,
and desires and to reject the fantasies of empire and conquest that such incor-
porations too easily risk sliding into. Instead, at journey’s end, surrounded by
so many maps to mirages, we might chart a course for the enduring promise of
defamiliarization and difference which the archival encounter fosters, finding
at last, like Dinshaw and Long, that “ ‘we were strange to ourselves and strange
to others.’ ”
In the coda to this collection, “Who Were We to Do Such a Thing?,” Joan
Nestle draws a different kind of map of archival hope and defamiliarization,
recalling her work with the Lesbian Herstory Archives and how her lived his-
tory now reframes that work: “Queer archives of the f uture perhaps w ill give
evidence that it is harder to live with a history than without one.” Rubbing
beside t hose foundational hopes for historical reparation through archival ac-
cumulation are “new questions, new uncertainties,” which redraw a hope in a
set archival destination with a desire for the queer archival to always unsettle
itself, to keep turning, to keep the friction burning: “The queer archives must
be a border crossing in all directions.”
The archival turn is thus so many turnings understood anew: a turning
back to take up those things that resource new futures, and a turning away
from certain turns taken. Nestle emphasizes how the queer archival project has
pivoted on these friction points of liberation and dissent, of exclusion and in-
corporation, and she turns these histories into archival histories themselves, as
she herself “is now the archived.” As the contemporary moment folds into the
Introduction · 27
past, under what terms might we ourselves concede to turn archival, to become
distilled into some kind of trace fragment or broken out as a kind of signal
for some kind of queer future? Under what terms should the contemporary
queer moment yield to its own archival processing? Turning back to any given
archive, we are reminded, of course, that seldom does the archived subject
have the opportunity to determine the terms of their own preservation. And
it is amid these ambiguities, turning between the archived and the archivist,
the lost and the found, that we see again and again how historical traces of the
queer past get turned into new knowledges and experiences which, in turn,
sponsor hope that the past and the future will turn into different things, time
and time again.
Notes
1 This anthology is also born out of our extended conversations with Kevin P. Murphy,
with whom we coedited two earlier issues of Radical History Review on the topic of
“Queering Archives” and to whom we are grateful for suggesting the title Turning
Archival for this anthology. We sincerely thank Gisela Fosado and Alejandra Mejía
at Duke University Press for her vision and support, and the anonymous readers who
improved the book as a whole.
2 Derrida, Archive Fever.
3 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 44.
4 McDonald, The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, 1.
5 Rosengarten, Between Memory and Document, 11.
6 Arondekar et al., “Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion,” 214.
7 For more on this discussion, see Weeks, “Queer(y)ing the ‘Modern Homosexual.’ ”
8 See, for instance, the documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria,
directed by Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman, and Stryker’s Transgender History.
Fieldmaking publications by Stryker and o thers—such as The Transgender Studies Reader,
The Transgender Studies Reader 2, and the founding of the journal tsq: Transgender
Studies Quarterly in 2014—have also centered engagements with the archives as key to the
development of trans studies. See Stryker and Whittle, The Transgender Studies Reader;
Stryker and Aizura, The Transgender Studies Reader 2; and tsq: Transgender Studies
Quarterly.
9 Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 11.
10 Samuels, “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time.”
11 Brilmyer, “Archival Assemblages.”
12 Cartwright, “Out of Sorts,” 64.
13 Cartwright, “Out of Sorts,” 67.
14 For more on the (queer) archival body, see Lee, “Be/longing in the Archival Body.”
15 Ogura, Verbs of Motion in Medieval English, 22.
16 Skeat, The Concise Dictionary of English Etymology, 528.
17 Partridge, Origins, 717.

18 Eichhorn, “Archival Genres,” 3.
19 Van Bussel, “Theoretical Framework,” 24, and Manoff, “Theories of the Archive,” 11.
20 See, for instance, Dean, Ruszczycky, and Squires, Porn Archives; Sigal, Tortorici,
and Whitehead, Ethnopornography; Palladini and Pustianaz, Lexicon for an Affec-
tive Archive; and Dever, Vickery, and Newman, The Intimate Archive. On the “rebel
archive,” see Hernández, City of Inmates.
21 Ketelaar, “Archival Turns and Returns,” 239.
22 Ketelaar, “Archival Turns and Returns,” 241.
23 Hernández, Archiving an Epidemic; McKinney, Information Activism; and Sheffield,
Documenting Rebellions.
24 See, for instance, Cifor, “Stains and Remains.”
25 McKemmish and Gilliland, “Archival and Recordkeeping Research,” 92.
26 Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 1 and 48.
28 For a different discussion of the “postarchival,” please see Cooper, “Imagining Some-
thing Else Entirely.”
29 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling.
30 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet.
31 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 201.
32 Blouin and Rosenberg, Processing the Past, 3.
33 See, for instance, Driskill, Finley, Gilley, and Morgensen, Queer Indigenous Studies. On
Samuel Steward, see Spring, Secret Historian.
34 Ahmed, Willful Subjects.
35 Cvetkovich, “Ephemera,” 183. For more on queer ephemera, see Muñoz, “Ephemera as
Evidence.”
36 “We Are Here: Contemporary Artists Explore Their Queer Heritage,” State Library
of Victoria, accessed March 3, 2022, https://www.slv.vic.gov.au/whats-on/we-are-here
-contemporary-artists-explore-their-queer-cultural-heritage.
37 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings. See here for the June L. Mazer Archives: http://
digital2.library.ucla.edu/mazer/, accessed March 3, 2022.
38 Steedman, Dust, 38.
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Introduction · 31
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
joyeux compagnon plein de franchise et d’entrain, d’un de ces
viveurs incorrigibles qui s’écrient encore à quarante ans : Il faut bien
que jeunesse se passe !
En général, les chevaliers d’industrie se connaissent d’instinct,
sinon de réputation. D’ailleurs, Cinqpoints et Blewitt, bien que volant
chacun dans une sphère différente, s’étaient rencontrés aux courses
et dans quelques réunions de joueurs. Jusqu’à ce jour, mon noble
maître, qui savait ce qu’il se devait à lui-même, n’avait point voulu se
compromettre en fréquentant un escroc de bas étage ; mais, peu de
temps après l’installation de Dakins, il commença à se montrer fort
affable envers son voisin. Le motif de ce changement de conduite
saute aux yeux : ayant deviné les intentions de Blewitt à l’égard du
nouveau locataire, Cinqpoints voulait avoir sa part du butin.
— John, quel est donc ce voisin qui a une passion si
malheureuse pour le flageolet ? me demanda-t-il un matin.
— Il se nomme Dakins, monsieur : c’est un jeune homme fort
riche et un ami intime de M. Blewitt.
Cinqpoints ne poussa pas plus loin cet interrogatoire ; il en savait
déjà assez. Un sourire diabolique dérida son visage, où je pus lire le
raisonnement que voici :
1o Un jeune homme qui cultive le flageolet est incapable

d’avoir inventé la poudre ;
2o Blewitt est un escroc ;
3o Lorsqu’un escroc et un joueur de flageolet deviennent
inséparables, c’est ce dernier qui doit payer les violons.
L’Honorable Percy Cinqpoints était bien fin ; mais je voyais aussi

clair que lui, malgré ma jeunesse. Les gentilshommes, fort
heureusement, n’ont pas accaparé tout l’esprit dont le bon Dieu a fait
ici-bas une distribution si inégale. Nous étions quatre valets dans
notre escalier, et je vous assure que nous savions bien des choses
dont personne ne se doutait au dehors. Dès que nos maîtres avaient
le dos tourné, nous furetions partout, et nous nous communiquions
nos découvertes. Nous lisions la plupart des lettres qu’ils recevaient
ou qu’ils écrivaient. Nous avions des clefs pour chaque armoire et
pour chaque meuble. Le lecteur croira sans doute que je me vante,
car on ne rend guère justice aux domestiques ; on les accuse même
de ne pas s’intéresser aux affaires de leurs maîtres. J’ignore si la
livrée a dégénéré depuis l’époque où j’ai cessé d’en faire partie ;
mais je puis affirmer que, de mon temps, nous n’avions rien de plus
à cœur que de découvrir les secrets de monsieur ou de madame.
Je retrouve dans mes papiers deux documents qui prouvent la
vérité de ce que je viens d’avancer. L’idée de dresser l’état des
finances de nos maîtres respectifs nous ayant été suggérée par le
valet de chambre d’un avocat célèbre, qui avait la manie de rédiger
des notes à propos de tout, le document no I me fut remis par le
groom de Richard Blewitt, en échange d’une copie du no II, que l’on
trouvera un peu plus loin.
No I
Résumé des dépenses de Richard Blewitt, Esq., pendant l’année

18.., d’après les notes, reçus, lettres et autres papiers trouvés dans
ses poches ou dans ses tiroirs.
Intérêt de diverses dettes contractées à Oxford F. 4,300

Loyer 1,600
Gages de M. son groom 600
Pension de notre cheval 1,750
Item d’une certaine dame, qui trompe monsieur comme si
elle avait affaire à un honnête homme 6,000
Argent de poche, environ 2,500
Mangeaille, marchand de vin, tailleur, etc., environ 5,000
Total 21,750
En fait de revenu, Richard Blewitt ne possédait qu’une rente
d’environ cinq mille francs que lui faisait son honnête homme de
père ; mais nous savons qu’un gentleman adroit, qui n’est pas trop
fier pour fréquenter les jockeys et les tripots, ne doit jamais se
trouver embarrassé pour gagner ses quinze ou vingt mille francs par
an.
Mon maître, qui voyait une meilleure société que son collègue,
dépensait naturellement beaucoup plus et payait beaucoup moins.
Les fournisseurs étaient trop heureux de faire crédit au fils d’un pair
du royaume. Les boutiquiers anglais savent honorer l’aristocratie, et
sont toujours prêts à se mettre à genoux devant un lord [5] . Ils
respectent jusqu’à la livrée d’un grand seigneur. — Je parle ici, bien
entendu, de la livrée proprement dite, et non de celle que le grand
seigneur endosse parfois lui-même en acceptant quelque fonction
bien rétribuée. Grâce au prestige de son nom, l’Honorable Percy
Cinqpoints n’a pas payé un sou à qui que ce soit, du moins à ma
connaissance, durant son séjour à Londres. Aussi, le total de ses
dettes formait-il un chiffre assez rond, ainsi que le démontre le
second document annoncé.
[5] En Angleterre, les boutiquiers n’ont pas le
monopole de cette adoration. Assez récemment on a vu
un membre du parlement dire, dans un petit speech
adressé à un colonel de cavalerie qui a servi en Crimée :
« Quoique pair d’Angleterre, vous n’avez pas hésité à
obéir à vos chefs. » Il est clair qu’aux yeux roturiers de
l’orateur, un pair d’Angleterre est un être supérieur au
commun des mortels et que s’il daigne accepter la paye
d’un colonel et remplir les devoirs de l’emploi, il a bien
mérité de la patrie.
(Note du traducteur.)
No II
Situation financière de l’Honorable Percy Cinqpoints, au mois d’août
18…
Fr. C.
Compte à notre débit au club de Crockford 68,775 »
Billets et lettres de change en circulation (nous ne les 124,075
en retirions presque jamais) »
Notes de vingt et un tailleurs 26,172 90
Item de trois marchands de chevaux 10,050 »
Item de deux carrossiers 7,836 75
Dettes oubliées à Cambridge 34,832 80
Mémoires de divers fournisseurs 12,675 35
Total 298,417
80
Le document ci-dessus m’a paru digne d’être conservé ; la plèbe,

toujours avide de savoir ce qui se passe dans le grand monde, ne
sera pas fâchée de connaître la somme à laquelle peuvent s’élever
les dettes d’un parfait gentleman.
Mais je digresse… Il est temps de retourner à notre pigeon.
Mon maître, le jour même où je lui avais donné les
renseignements en question, se trouva face à face dans l’escalier
avec Blewitt qui, debout sur le pas de sa porte, était en train
d’allumer un cigare et s’apprêtait sans doute à faire une visite
matinale à l’infortuné amateur de flageolet. Cinqpoints, au lieu de le
couper selon son habitude, s’avança avec un sourire des plus
gracieux et lui tendit sa main gantée, en disant :
— Eh parbleu ! mon cher monsieur Blewitt, puisque je suis assez
heureux pour vous rencontrer, j’ai bien envie de vous adresser des
reproches !… Entre voisins, on ne devrait point rester aussi
longtemps sans se voir.
Blewitt parut d’abord flatté, puis surpris, puis soupçonneux.
— En effet, je crois que nous aurions pu nous voir plus souvent,
répondit-il d’un ton ironique.
— Si je ne me trompe, je n’ai pas eu le plaisir de me trouver avec
vous depuis ce fameux dîner de sir Georges Lansquenet, reprit
Cinqpoints sans se laisser intimider par cette rebuffade. La
charmante soirée ! Quels vins exquis et quelles bonnes chansons
surtout !… Je me rappelle encore celle que vous nous avez chantée.
D’honneur, c’est la plus jolie chose de ce genre que j’aie entendue
de ma vie. J’en parlais encore hier au duc de Doncastre… Vous
connaissez le duc, je crois ?
— Non, répliqua Blewitt en lançant une épaisse bouffée de tabac.
— Vous m’étonnez. Je veux être pendu, Blewitt, si le duc ne sait
pas par cœur tous vos bons mots.
La bouderie de Blewitt dura quelque temps encore ; mais il finit
par faire le gros dos et par prendre pour pain bénit les atroces
flagorneries que débitait son collègue en industrie. Lorsque ce
dernier s’aperçut qu’il avait produit l’impression voulue, il s’écria :
— Ah çà, mon cher Blewitt, où donc trouvez-vous des cigares
comme celui-là ? Il a un parfum qui me donne des envies, à moi qui
ne suis pas fumeur. En auriez-vous un pareil à m’offrir ?
— Oui, parbleu ! Faites-moi donc le plaisir d’entrer chez moi.
Une heure après, Cinqpoints remonta chez nous beaucoup plus
jaune que de coutume. J’ai vu quelques chiens malades dans le
cours de mon existence, jamais je n’ai vu un animal aussi
ignoblement indisposé que mon honorable maître. Malgré l’horreur
que lui inspirait le tabac, il venait de fumer un cigare tout entier.
Vous devinez qu’il ne s’était pas livré pour rien à ce délassement
antipathique.
Lorsque notre voisin eut fermé sa porte, le bruit de la
conversation avait naturellement cessé d’arriver jusqu’à moi ; mais,
grâce aux observations de mon camarade, le groom de M. Blewitt,
j’ai pu renouer le fil de l’entretien.
Cinqpoints, après avoir caressé de nouveau la vanité de son
confrère, s’était mis à parler de ce jeune locataire qui jouait si bien
du flageolet ; puis il avait ajouté, comme en passant, que lorsqu’on
demeurait porte à porte, on devait se connaître, et que d’ailleurs il
serait très-heureux d’être présenté à un ami de M. Richard Blewitt.
Ce dernier aperçut alors le piége qu’on lui tendait, et, honteux de
s’être laissé prendre aux compliments mielleux de Cinqpoints, refusa
obstinément de donner dans le panneau.
— J’ai connu ce Dakins à l’Université, répondit-il. Entre nous, ce
n’est pas une de ces connaissances que l’on tienne beaucoup à
cultiver. Il m’a fait une visite, je la lui ai rendue, et je compte m’en
tenir là. Son père vendait des bottes, ou du fromage, ou quelque
chose de ce genre… j’ignore au juste sa spécialité ; mais il est clair
que ce garçon n’est le fils de personne, et vous sentez que je ne me
soucie guère de le fréquenter.
Bref, l’habileté de mon maître échoua ; il dut lever la séance,
ayant fumé son cigare en pure perte.
— Peste soit du butor ! s’écria-t-il en se jetant sur un divan.
C’était bien la peine de m’empoisonner avec son infernal tabac !…
Ah ! il croit plumer à loisir ce jeune homme ; mais je préviendrai sa
victime !
Cette menace m’amusa tellement que je manquai d’étouffer
(derrière la porte, bien entendu) d’une envie de rire rentrée. Dans le
langage de Cinqpoints, prévenir les gens voulait dire faire mettre un
cadenas à l’écurie, après avoir volé le cheval.
Pas plus tard que le lendemain, mon maître fit connaissance
avec Dakins, au moyen d’un petit stratagème qui donnera la mesure
de son talent. La comédie fut improvisée et représentée le même
matin.
Depuis quelque temps déjà, le droit, la poésie et le flageolet ne
suffisaient plus à remplir l’existence du jeune étudiant. Le perfide
Blewitt le conduisait par un chemin fleuri vers le gouffre du désordre.
En termes plus clairs, il le menait chaque soir dans des tavernes où
ils se livraient ensemble à des études comparées sur le porter, l’ale,
le gin, et les autres spiritueux que l’on débite dans ces sortes
d’établissements. Or, l’homme est pétri d’une argile qu’il ne faut pas
humecter outre mesure ; pour peu qu’on passe une moitié de la nuit
à l’arroser, on ressent le lendemain un certain malaise ; on a besoin,
pour se remettre, d’un petit repas bien affriolant. Aussi rencontrait-on
chaque matin dans notre escalier un garçon de restaurant qui
apportait de quoi rafraîchir le gosier desséché du jeune Dakins.
Une circonstance aussi triviale en apparence n’eût sans doute
pas frappé un esprit vulgaire, mais elle n’avait pas échappé à mon
maître. Ce fut là-dessus qu’il basa son plan d’attaque. Le lendemain
de son entrevue avec Blewitt, il m’envoya acheter un de ces pâtés
que les Français fabriquent avec certains volatiles atteints d’une
maladie de foie. Je rapportai le précieux comestible emballé dans
une espèce de tambour. Savez-vous ce que Cinqpoints me fit écrire
sur la boîte ?… J’aime mieux vous le dire tout de suite, car vous ne
devineriez jamais… J’écrivis en toutes lettres :
A l’Honorable Percy Cinqpoints, avec les compliments

empressés du prince de Talleyrand.
— Quel horrible griffonnage ! s’écria mon maître en contemplant

ma calligraphie. Mais, bah ! cela n’en vaut que mieux… Tous les
grands hommes écrivent comme des chats.
Ce jour-là, par le plus grand des hasards, Cinqpoints sortit de
bonne heure, au moment où on montait le déjeuner de Dakins.
Contre son habitude, il était gai comme un pinson, et fredonnait un
air d’opéra en faisant tourner sa canne entre ses doigts. Il
descendait très-vite, et (toujours par le plus grand des hasards) sa
canne donna au beau milieu du plateau. Voilà les assiettes, les
viandes, le vin, l’eau de Seltz qui se mettent à dégringoler de
marche en marche pour ne s’arrêter qu’au bas de l’escalier. A la vue
de ce malheur, Cinqpoints accabla d’injures le garçon ébahi, et se
hâta de remonter.
— Voilà une fâcheuse aventure, John ! me dit-il. Tâchons de
réparer ma maladresse.
Je ne devinai pas encore où il voulait en venir. Il s’assit devant
son secrétaire et écrivit quelques lignes, qu’il cacheta à ses armes.
— Tiens, continua-t-il en me tendant la lettre, porte ce billet à M.
Dakins avec le pâté que tu as acheté hier… Si tu as le malheur de
dire d’où il vient, je promets de te casser ma canne sur les épaules.
Une pénible expérience m’ayant démontré que ces sortes de
promesses étaient les seules que Cinqpoints se piquât de tenir,
j’exécutai ma commission avec zèle et discrétion. Dakins me fit
attendre la réponse un grand quart d’heure. Voici cette
correspondance, écrite à la troisième personne, ainsi que cela se
pratique dans le grand monde :
L’HONORABLE H. P. CINQPOINTS A T. DAKINS, ESQ.
« L’honorable Hector-Percy Cinqpoints, en présentant ses

compliments à Monsieur Thomas Dakins, ose espérer que
son voisin voudra bien lui pardonner sa maladresse de tantôt,
et lui permettre de chercher à la réparer. Si Monsieur T.
Dakins daigne accepter le pâté ci-joint (envoi d’un
gastronome célèbre), M. Cinqpoints n’aura pas le remords
d’avoir privé un voisin de son repas habituel.
» Mardi matin. »
RÉPONSE DE T. DAKINS, ESQ.
« M. Thomas Dakins a l’honneur de présenter ses

compliments à l’Honorable H. P. Cinqpoints, et s’empresse de
le remercier de l’aimable façon dont il vient de réparer un
accident qu’il pouvait regarder comme pardonné d’avance.
Cet accident, que l’Honorable H. P. Cinqpoints semble
regretter, serait un des plus heureux événements de la vie de
M. Thomas Dakins, si son voisin daignait mettre le comble à
sa générosité en venant partager le déjeuner dont il a fait les
frais.
» Mardi matin. »
J’ai ri plus d’une fois en relisant ces deux épîtres. La bourde à

propos du prince de Talleyrand avait complétement réussi. Le trop
jeune Dakins était devenu pourpre de plaisir en parcourant la lettre
de mon maître ; il avait déchiré plusieurs brouillons avant d’être
satisfait de sa réponse. Je ne sais s’il finit par être content de lui ;
dans tous les cas, Cinqpoints fut enchanté, sinon du style, du moins
du sens de la réplique. Inutile d’ajouter qu’il s’empressa d’accepter la
gracieuse invitation de son voisin.
Le pâté entamé, une conversation amicale ne tarda pas à
s’engager entre les deux convives. L’honorable invité s’extasia
devant le goût exquis de Dakins, admirant ses meubles, ses
connaissances classiques, la coupe de son habit et son talent sur le
flageolet. Lorsqu’il offrit à son hôte de le présenter au duc de
Doncastre, l’infortuné pigeon fut ensorcelé du coup. Pauvre garçon !
Si sa naïveté ne me faisait pas tant rire, je la respecterais. Je tiens
de bonne source qu’il se rendit le jour même chez le tailleur à la
mode, afin de commander un habillement complet pour faire son
entrée dans le monde aristocratique.
La conversation commençait à languir, lorsque Richard Blewitt
s’annonça en ouvrant la porte d’un grandissime coup de pied.
— Tom, mon vieux, comment va ce matin ? cria-t-il.
Au même instant il aperçut son collègue : sa mâchoire s’allongea
à vue d’œil ; de rouge qu’il était il devint blême, puis écarlate.
— Eh ! bonjour donc, mon cher monsieur Blewitt ! Nous parlions
justement de vous, et notre aimable voisin faisait votre éloge, dit
Cinqpoints avec un sourire et un geste pleins d’affabilité.
Blewitt se laissa tomber sur un fauteuil, ne cherchant pas à
cacher sa mauvaise humeur. Il s’agissait de savoir lequel des deux
quitterait le premier la place ; mais Blewitt n’était pas de force à ce
jeu-là contre mon maître. Inquiet, maussade, silencieux, il laissa le
champ libre à son collègue, qui se montra plein de verve et d’esprit ;
si bien que le nouveau venu abandonna bientôt la partie, et se leva
en prétextant un mal de tête. A peine fut-il dehors, que Cinqpoints le
suivit, et, lui prenant le bras, l’invita à monter chez lui. Dès qu’ils
furent installés dans le salon, j’appliquai mon oreille contre la porte.
Malgré la politesse exquise de mon maître, qui se déclarait enchanté
d’avoir renoué connaissance avec son voisin, Blewitt ne paraissait
nullement disposé à se laisser amadouer. Enfin, au moment où
Cinqpoints lui débitait une histoire à propos de l’éternel duc de
Doncastre, le butor éclata :
— Que le diable vous crève, vous et vos ducs ! Allons, allons,
monsieur Cinqpoints, votre titre ne m’en impose pas, à moi ! Je vous
connais, et je vois maintenant pourquoi il vous a plu de devenir si
poli tout d’un coup… Vous voudriez plumer ce petit Dakins ? Mais,
sacrebleu, je suis là pour déranger votre jeu !… Gardez vos amis,
monsieur, et laissez-moi les miens.
— Je vous connais tout aussi bien que vous pouvez me
connaître, répondit mon maître sans élever la voix : escroc de bas
étage, vous êtes un poltron de premier ordre. Je vous conseille donc
de ne pas parler trop haut : d’abord, cela est de fort mauvais ton ;
ensuite, vous m’obligeriez à vous souffleter…
— Sacrebleu ! interrompit Blewitt.
— A vous souffleter en public, continua tranquillement
Cinqpoints, et même à vous loger une balle dans le corps, dans le
cas, peu probable, où vous jugeriez à propos de faire le méchant. Je
vous avoue qu’il me serait fort pénible d’en venir à de pareilles
extrémités, car j’ai pour système d’éviter autant que possible les
esclandres ; mais la chose dépend de vous. Voici mes conditions :
vous avez déjà gagné deux mille écus à ce jeune homme ; eh bien,
je serai bon prince : je consens à oublier le passé, pourvu qu’à
l’avenir nous partagions les bénéfices.
Il y eut une pause dans la conversation à la suite de ces
compliments à brûle-pourpoint. Il paraît que Blewitt réfléchissait.
— Décidez-vous, reprit enfin Cinqpoints ; si vous gagnez encore
un sou à Dakins sans ma permission, je le saurai, et vous aurez
affaire à moi.
— Me décider, me décider, c’est facile à dire !… Sacrebleu ! je
trouve vos conditions fort dures… Que diable ! puisque c’est moi qui
ai levé le gibier, c’est à moi qu’il appartient.
— Monsieur Blewitt, vous prétendiez hier ne pas vouloir
fréquenter ce jeune homme, et il m’a fallu inventer toute une
comédie, afin de faire sa connaissance. Je voudrais bien savoir en
quoi l’honneur m’oblige à vous le céder ?
L’honneur ! c’était charmant d’entendre Cinqpoints prononcer ce
mot ! Je fus presque tenté de prévenir le jeune Dakins du complot
qui se tramait ; mais je ne cédai pas à cette mauvaise inspiration.
— Fi donc, John ! me dis-je ; si ces deux gentilshommes ignorent
ce que c’est que l’honneur, toi, tu le sais. L’honneur consiste à ne
pas trahir les secrets d’un maître, avant d’avoir reçu son congé…
Après, c’est autre chose, l’obligation cesse de plein droit.
Bref, le lendemain, il y eut grand dîner chez nous ; — potage à la
bisque, turbot sauce homard, gigot de pré salé, coqs de bruyère,
macaroni au gratin, plum-pudding, fruits, etc., le tout arrosé de vin de
Champagne, de Porto et de Bordeaux. Il n’y avait que trois
convives : c’est-à-dire l’Honorable H. P. Cinqpoints, Richard Blewitt
et Thomas Dakins. C’était un vrai chef-d’œuvre que ce repas, et je
vous réponds que nous autres messieurs de l’antichambre nous y
fîmes honneur. Le jeune homme de M. Blewitt mangea tant de gibier
(lorsqu’on le rapporta à la cuisine), que je crus qu’il en serait malade.
Le groom de Dakins, qui n’avait guère plus de treize ans, se régala
si copieusement de macaroni et de plum-pudding, qu’il se crut obligé
d’avaler en guise de dessert deux des pilules digestives de son
maître, qui faillirent l’achever… Mais je digresse encore : je parle de
l’office, tandis que je devrais m’occuper du salon.
Le croirait-on ? Après avoir bu huit ou dix bouteilles de vin à eux
trois, les convives se mirent à jouer à l’écarté. Ce jeu se joue à
deux ; par conséquent, lorsqu’on est trois, le troisième reste les bras
croisés à regarder les autres. On commença par jouer trois francs la
fiche et vingt-cinq francs la partie, et à minuit on ne s’était pas fait
grand mal. Dakins gagnait cinquante francs et Blewitt trente-six.
Après souper (je leur avais servi du champagne et des grillades),
les enjeux furent plus élevés. On paria vingt-cinq francs la fiche et
cent vingt-cinq francs la partie. Je songeai aux compliments que
mon maître et Blewitt avaient échangés le matin, et je crus que
l’heure de Dakins venait de sonner. Eh bien, pas du tout. Il continua
à gagner ; Blewitt pariait pour lui, l’aidait de ses conseils et jouait de
son mieux. A la fin de la soirée, qui n’arriva que vers cinq heures du
matin, je rentrai dans le salon ; Cinqpoints examinait une carte sur
laquelle il avait inscrit le nombre de parties et de points perdus.
— Je n’ai pas été en veine ce soir, disait-il… Blewitt, je vous
dois… voyons un peu… mille vingt-cinq francs, je crois ?
— Mille vingt-cinq, ni plus ni moins, répondit Blewitt.
— Je vais vous donner un mandat sur mon banquier, continua
mon honorable maître.
— Allons donc ! rien ne presse, mon cher monsieur.
— Si, les dettes de jeu se payent sur l’heure, répliqua Cinqpoints,
qui prit un carnet de banque et remplit un mandat qu’il remit à son
collègue. Maintenant je vais régler avec vous, mon cher monsieur
Dakins. Si vous aviez su profiter de votre veine, vous m’auriez
gagné une somme assez ronde… Voyons, c’est très-facile à
calculer… Treize fiches à vingt-cinq francs, cela fait trois cent vingt-
cinq francs.
Cinqpoints tira treize souverains de sa bourse et les jeta sur la
table, où ils produisirent en tombant cette musique si agréable à
l’oreille du joueur qui gagne. La joie brillait dans les yeux de Dakins,
sa main tremblait en ramassant l’or ; non qu’il fût avare, mais la
fièvre du jeu commençait déjà à s’emparer de lui.
— Permettez-moi de dire que j’ai rarement rencontré un joueur
de votre force, bien que je me pique d’avoir une certaine expérience,
ajouta mon maître.
— Vous me flattez, mon cher monsieur Cinqpoints.
Je crois bien qu’on le flattait. C’est justement ce qu’on voulait.
— Ah çà, Dakins, poursuivit Cinqpoints, il me faut une revanche ;
à vous deux vous m’avez ruiné, complétement ruiné !
— Eh bien, répondit Dakins, aussi fier que s’il eût gagné un
million, fixons le jour… Demain soir, si vous voulez ?… Vous me
ferez le plaisir de dîner avec moi, bien entendu… Cela vous
convient-il ?
Blewitt accepta de suite. Mon maître se fit un peu prier.
— Soit. Demain, chez vous, dit-il enfin. Mais, mon cher Dakins,
pas trop de vin, je vous en prie. Le vin ne me vaut rien, surtout
quand je dois jouer à l’écarté avec vous.
L’infortuné pigeon se retira plus heureux qu’un roi.
— Tiens, John, voilà pour toi, dit-il en me jetant une des pièces
d’or qu’il venait de gagner.
Pauvre diable ! je voyais déjà comment cela devait finir.
Le plus drôle de l’histoire, c’est que mon maître avait emprunté à
Blewitt l’argent qui devait servir d’appât. A la suite de l’entrevue dont
j’ai rendu compte, j’avais accompagné ce dernier jusque chez lui, et
il m’avait remis cinq cents francs en or pour son collègue.
La fin de l’aventure est facile à prévoir. Si Dakins avait eu un peu
plus de bon sens, il aurait perdu sa fortune en six semaines ou deux
mois ; mais il était si naïf qu’il ne fallut que quelques jours pour le
ruiner.
Le lendemain jeudi (mon maître n’avait fait la connaissance de
Dakins que le mardi), le jeune étudiant nous donna donc à dîner. On
se mit à table à sept heures ; à onze heures on commença à jouer.
Je devinai que cette fois la partie allait devenir sérieuse, car on nous
envoya coucher dès que nous eûmes servi le souper. Vendredi
matin, je descendis à l’heure habituelle. Cinqpoints n’était pas rentré.
Vers midi, il vint faire un peu de toilette et retourna chez Dakins,
après avoir commandé des grillades et de l’eau de Seltz.
On servit le dîner à sept heures ; mais personne ne paraissait
avoir le moindre appétit, car la plupart des plats nous revinrent
intacts. Cependant les convives demandèrent encore du vin ; ils
avaient vidé près de deux douzaines de bouteilles depuis la veille.
Vers onze heures du soir, mon maître rentra chez lui. Il
trébuchait, il chantait, il riait ; je crois même qu’il essaya de danser.
En un mot, il paraissait ivre. Il finit par se jeter tout habillé sur son lit,
après m’avoir lancé une poignée de menue monnaie. Je lui ôtai ses
bottes et ses vêtements, puis je l’abandonnai à ses réflexions.
Dès que je l’eus mis à son aise, je fis ce que doit faire tout bon
domestique ; je vidai ses poches et j’examinai les papiers qu’elles
renfermaient. C’est là une précaution que je ne saurais trop
recommander à mes confrères… dans l’intérêt de leurs maîtres, cela
va sans dire.
Je découvris, entre autres choses, le document que voici :
I. O. U.
Quatre mille sept cents livres sterling.
Thomas Dakins.
Vendredi, 13 janvier.
Cela voulait dire : « Je vous dois cent dix-sept mille cinq cents
francs. »
Ce chiffon sans prétention était aussi valable qu’un billet de
banque, car Blewitt avait eu soin de prévenir Dakins que Cinqpoints,
fort chatouilleux sur le point d’honneur, avait tué en duel deux
joueurs assez malhonnêtes pour refuser de payer une dette de jeu.
Je trouvai un autre papier du même genre signé Richard Blewitt,
pour une somme de dix mille francs ; mais je savais que celui-là ne
signifiait rien.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Le lendemain matin, l’Honorable Percy Cinqpoints se trouva
debout dès neuf heures, aussi sobre qu’un juge. Il s’habilla et se
rendit chez Dakins. Environ une heure après, il demanda son
cabriolet, dans lequel il monta avec sa dupe.
Pauvre Dakins ! Les yeux rouges, la poitrine gonflée de sanglots
comprimés, il se laissa tomber à côté de mon maître sans prononcer
une parole, avec ce frisson fiévreux que donne une nuit d’insomnie
et de remords.
Sa fortune consistait en rentes sur l’État. Ce jour-là, il vendit tout,
à l’exception d’un capital d’une dizaine de mille francs.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Vers deux heures, Cinqpoints était de retour. Son ami Blewitt se
présenta pour la troisième fois.
— Votre maître est rentré ? demanda-t-il.
Je répondis affirmativement.
J’annonçai sa visite ; puis, dès que j’eus refermé la porte du
salon, je regardai par le trou de la serrure, et j’ouvris l’oreille.
— Eh bien, dit Blewitt, nous avons fait un assez joli coup de filet,
mon cher Cinqpoints… Il paraît que vous avez déjà réglé avec
Dakins ?
— En effet, monsieur.
— Cent dix-sept mille cinq cents francs, je crois ?
— Mais oui… A peu près.
— Cela fait, pour ma part… voyons un peu… oui, cela fait
cinquante trois mille sept cent cinquante francs, que vous avez à me
remettre, mon cher.
— Vraiment, monsieur Blewitt, je ne vous comprends pas du tout.
— Vous ne me comprenez pas ! s’écria l’autre d’un ton de voix
impossible à décrire. N’est-il pas convenu que nous devons partager
les bénéfices ? Ne vous ai-je pas prêté de quoi payer vos pertes des
deux premières soirées ? Ne m’avez-vous pas donné votre parole
d’honneur que vous me remettriez la moitié de ce que je vous
aiderais à gagner ?
— Tout cela est parfaitement exact.
— Alors, que diable avez-vous à objecter à ma réclamation ?
— Rien… si ce n’est que je n’ai jamais eu la moindre intention de
tenir ma promesse… Ah çà, vous êtes-vous vraiment imaginé que
j’allais travailler pour vous ? Avez-vous été assez idiot pour vous
figurer que j’avais donné à dîner à ce nigaud, afin de mettre de
l’argent dans votre poche ?… Ce serait trop drôle, et j’ai meilleure
opinion de vous… Allons, monsieur, cessons cette plaisanterie. Vous
savez où est la porte… Mais attendez un instant. Je serai généreux ;
je vous donnerai dix mille francs pour la part que vous réclamez
dans cette affaire… Tenez, voici votre propre billet pour cette
somme ; je vous le rends, à condition que vous oublierez avoir
jamais connu l’Honorable Percy Cinqpoints.
Blewitt gronda, cria, gémit, pria, menaça, frappa du pied. Tantôt il
jurait et grinçait des dents ; tantôt il suppliait son cher M. Cinqpoints
d’avoir pitié de lui. Finalement, il se mit à pleurnicher comme un
enfant.
Mon maître, impatienté, ouvrit la porte du salon, où je manquai
de tomber la tête la première.
— Reconduisez monsieur, me dit Cinqpoints en regardant Blewitt
dans le blanc des yeux.
Ce dernier quitta le canapé sur lequel il s’était jeté avec un geste
de désespoir, et sortit, faisant une mine aussi piteuse qu’un chien
qu’on menace du fouet. Quelques années plus tard, il eut
l’imprudence de commettre un faux, et fut transporté à Botany-Bay.
Quant à Dakins, Dieu sait ce qu’il est devenu ; moi, je l’ignore.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
— John, dit mon maître, lorsque j’eus reconduit le visiteur, John,
je vais à Paris. Vous pouvez m’accompagner si cela vous convient.
II
IMPRESSIONS DE VOYAGE
Bien que Cinqpoints ne fût rien moins que modeste, il ne se

vanta pas de son bonheur au jeu, et ne parla à personne de la
somme qu’il avait gagnée au jeune Dakins. Il oublia même de
prévenir ses fournisseurs de son projet de voyage. Au contraire, je
reçus l’ordre de coller sur la porte une bande de papier où mon
maître avait écrit : « Je serai de retour à sept heures et demie. »
Lorsque la blanchisseuse présenta sa petite note, on lui dit de
repasser. Cette note ne s’élevait pas à une somme formidable ; mais
c’est étonnant comme certaines gens deviennent économes, quand
ils ont en poche quelques milliers de francs.
A sept heures, Cinqpoints et moi, nous roulions sur la route de
Douvres, lui dans l’intérieur, moi à l’extérieur de la malle-poste.
J’étais enchanté de voyager, car dès l’âge de raison j’avais toujours
désiré courir le monde. Cependant, je dois avouer que mes
premières impressions ne furent pas des plus agréables, attendu
que j’avais pour voisins un Italien, dont je ne comprenais pas
l’affreux baragouin, et son singe dont le langage, par compensation,
était beaucoup trop explicite : il me montrait les dents et menaçait, à
chaque cahot de la voiture, de m’égratigner le visage.
Enfin, nous arrivâmes sains et saufs à Douvres, où nous
descendîmes au Ship Hotel. J’avais toujours ouï dire que l’on
pouvait vivre à beaucoup meilleur marché en province que dans la
capitale ; mais c’est là un préjugé, et mon maître l’apprit à ses
dépens. A Douvres, tout est si cher que les pauvres aubergistes sont
obligés de faire payer une simple côtelette trois francs, un verre d’ale
vingt-cinq sous, et quelques gorgées de vin chaud deux francs
cinquante centimes. Rien que pour allumer une bougie, il vous en
coûte presque aussi cher que pour brûler la livre entière à Londres.
Du reste, Cinqpoints paya sans faire la moindre observation. Dès
qu’il s’agissait de ses besoins personnels, il ne regardait jamais à la
dépense : c’est une justice à lui rendre, et comme je n’ai pas
cherché à pallier ses défauts, je ne dois pas non plus taire ses
qualités.
Nous ne passâmes qu’une demi-journée dans cette localité
dispendieuse. Le lendemain nous nous embarquâmes pour
Boulogne-sur-mer.
En analysant le nom de cette dernière ville, je m’étais
naturellement figuré qu’elle était en effet située sur la mer. Je vous
laisse à deviner quel fut mon désappointement, lorsqu’à mon arrivée
je reconnus qu’elle se trouve non sur la mer, mais sur la côte. C’est
ainsi qu’on est trompé par les géographes !
Mais n’anticipons pas, nous ne sommes pas encore arrivés…
Quelle rude épreuve qu’une pareille traversée !… Combien je
regrettai d’avoir abandonné la terre ferme pour confier ma précieuse
existence au caprice des flots inconstants !… Compatissant lecteur,
as-tu jamais traversé la Manche ?… « O mer, vaste mer, je veux
m’endormir sur ton sein d’azur, mollement bercé par la vague qui
caresse les flancs de mon léger navire… » Cela est très-joli en
romance, mais la réalité est beaucoup moins agréable. D’ailleurs les
vagues ne sont pas bleues, elles ressemblent plutôt à de l’encre, ou
à du porter écumeux, fraîchement tiré ; et, loin de vous bercer
mollement, elles vous secouent d’une façon toute particulière.
Cependant je n’éprouvai d’abord aucune sensation désagréable.
Au contraire, j’étais fier de me sentir à flot pour la première fois de
ma vie. Lorsque les voiles se gonflèrent et que notre barque
commença à fendre l’onde amère ; lorsque je contemplai le pavillon
de l’Angleterre se déployant au haut du mât, le commis aux vivres
préparant ses cuvettes, et le capitaine arpentant le pont d’un pas
assuré ; lorsque enfin je vis disparaître dans le lointain les côtes
blanches de ma terre natale et les voitures de l’établissement des
bains — alors je me sentis grandir.
— John, me dis-je, te voilà devenu un homme. Ta majorité
précoce date du moment où tu as mis le pied sur ce navire. Sois
sage, sois prudent. Dis un long adieu aux folies de ta jeunesse. Tu
n’es plus un enfant ; rejette tes billes et ta toupie… rejette…
Ici mon discours fut soudain interrompu par une sensation
singulière, puis pénible, qui finit par me maîtriser complétement. La
délicatesse me défend d’entrer dans de plus amples détails. Je dirai
seulement que je fus bien, bien malade. Pendant quelques heures,
je restai étendu sur le pont, dans un état de prostration impossible à
décrire, souffrant le martyre, insensible à la pluie qui m’inondait le
visage et aux plaisanteries des marins qui me marchaient sur le
corps. Je crois que j’aurais béni celui d’entre eux qui aurait mis fin à
mes souffrances en me jetant à la mer. Cela dura quatre mortelles
heures, qui me parurent autant d’années.
Pendant que je subissais ainsi mon purgatoire, un des hommes
du bord s’approcha de l’endroit où nous autres domestiques nous
étions entassés.
— Eh ! John ! cria-t-il.
— Qu’est-ce qu’il y a ? répliquai-je d’une voix affaiblie.
— On vous demande.
— Laissez-moi tranquille.
— Votre maître est malade ; il a besoin de vous.
— Qu’il aille au diable ! répondis-je en me retournant de l’autre
côté et en poussant un gémissement.
Je n’aurais pas bougé pour vingt mille maîtres.
Depuis lors, j’ai sillonné plus d’une fois la vaste profondeur des
mers ; mais jamais je n’ai fait une aussi horrible traversée qu’en l’an
de grâce 18… Les paquebots à vapeur étaient rares à cette époque,
et nous avions dû prendre passage à bord d’un petit bâtiment à
voiles. Enfin, au moment où je me croyais aux portes de la mort, on
m’annonça que nous touchions au terme de notre voyage. Avec
quelle allégresse j’aperçus les lumières qui brillaient sur la côte dont
nous approchions ! Avec quelle joie je sentis diminuer l’odieux roulis

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Introduction: (RE)TURNING TO THE QUEER ARCHIVES · 1

1. ARCHIVES, BODIES, AND IMAGINATION: THE CASE OF JUANA

2. DECOLONIAL ARCHIVAL IMAGINARIES: ON LOSING, PERFORMING,

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9. PIRATES AND PUNKS: BOOTLEGS, ARCHIVES, AND PER­F OR­M ANCE

10. UNFIXED: MATERIALIZING DISABILITY AND QUEERNESS IN

11. AN ARCHIVAL LIFE: UNSETTLING QUEER IMMIGRANT DWELLINGS · 285

12. REASSESSING “THE ARCHIVE” IN QUEER THEORY · 303

13. CROCKER LAND: A MIRAGE IN THE ARCHIVE · 321

The book’s cover artwork is based on art by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: H1

(Re)Turning to the Queer Archives

20 · Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici

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1o Un jeune homme qui cultive le flageolet est incapable

L’Honorable Percy Cinqpoints était bien fin ; mais je voyais aussi

Résumé des dépenses de Richard Blewitt, Esq., pendant l’année

Intérêt de diverses dettes contractées à Oxford F. 4,300

Le document ci-dessus m’a paru digne d’être conservé ; la plèbe,

A l’Honorable Percy Cinqpoints, avec les compliments

— Quel horrible griffonnage ! s’écria mon maître en contemplant

L’HONORABLE H. P. CINQPOINTS A T. DAKINS, ESQ.

« L’honorable Hector-Percy Cinqpoints, en présentant ses

RÉPONSE DE T. DAKINS, ESQ.

« M. Thomas Dakins a l’honneur de présenter ses

J’ai ri plus d’une fois en relisant ces deux épîtres. La bourde à

Bien que Cinqpoints ne fût rien moins que modeste, il ne se

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7. NAMING AFRIKA’S ARCHIVE “QUEER PAN-A FRICANISM” · 185

9. PIRATES AND PUNKS: BOOTLEGS, ARCHIVES, AND PERF ORM ANCE