Title
Queer Persistence in the Archive
Document Type
Contribution to Book
Publication Date
2018
Abstract
This chapter focuses on queer geographies, persistence, relations, emotions, and investments as complex parts of archival research process. My insights come from a major current project, a four-city comparison of LGBT participation in citywide festivals in the Southwest and Gulf South. I have been studying the celebration of the Carnival season or Mardi Gras in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Mobile, Alabama; I compare these festivities to the southwestern historical pageantry of Fiesta in San Antonio, Texas, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. My central question concerns whether or not these festivals are sites in which LGBT people assert themselves as valued members of the city as a form of cultural citizenship. Many of my archival insights come from researching a San Antonio Fiesta event called Cornyation, a mock debutante pageant started by gay men in the 1950s that turned into a major HIV-AIDS fund-raiser in the 1990s. This project began with my fascination with this show and its prominence during my city's annual festival. The project combines interview, ethnographic, and archival research to capture the history and contemporary nature of festival life in two understudies regions. The geography of this project, in the urban South and Southwest, shapes the availability of archival materials.
Editor
D'Lane R. Compton, Tey Meadow, & Kristen Schilt
Publisher
University of California Press
City
Oakland, CA
ISBN
9780520963993, 9780520289277
Repository Citation
Stone, A. L. (2018). Queer persistence in the archive. In D'L. R. Compton, T. Meadow, & K. Schilt (Eds.), Other, please specify: Queer methods in sociology (pp. 216-229). University of California Press.
Publication Information
Other, Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology