This seminar covers novels and films that actively engage with archives and circulate hidden feminist and queer knowledge. The texts we will discuss refer to a variety of archival sources, such as feminist and queer grassroots archives, the archive of the ACT UP movement that emerged during the AIDS crisis, archival materials of the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s, and even fictional archives of histories that could have happened. We will ask if novels and films have the potential of transferring “storage memory” to “functional memory” (Assmann) and discuss different theoretical approaches to archives. Saidiya Hartman’s influential framework of critical fabulation is a creative way of addressing and working with a past that is inadequately accessible – be it because of gaps in the archive, or because the available historical sources are hostile and violent towards its subjects. Next to highlighting the potentials of such creative approaches to writing history, we will also look at their potential pitfalls. Among the texts we will discuss are Justin Torres’s novel Blackouts (2023), Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), Jennifer Mathieu’s young adult novel Moxie (2017) and its filmic adaptation, Cheryl Dunye’s film The Watermelon Woman (1997), Jim Hubbard’s documentary United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (2012), the TV-series Pose (2018-2021), Irene Lusztig’s documentary Yours in Sisterhood (2018), as well as Zoe Beloff’s art project The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle (2009).
- Kursleiter*in: Dr. Simon Dickel