Intermittent Interest and Low-Grade Archival Fevers

Streaming platforms powered by algorithms produce an exchange of analysis: users analyze media while the very platforms they use to do so also analyze them and augment their access to the archive accordingly. This essay suggests the term intermittent interest to name a relational engagement with an ever-changing television archive, one that is less intense, perhaps, than either full-blown archive desire or its complementary nemesis, archive fever, and timely in an unstable digital mediascape. I define a method that relies on acknowledging fluctuating degrees of interest when historicizing queer television, followed by examples from my own intermittent experiences of the archive.