Archiving utopia : an exercise in queer uncertainty

This creative practice thesis comprises two correlating documents, a work of longform fiction titled <i>The Endling,</i> and an accompanying exegesis. The thesis draws on my own lived experience at Amazon Acres, a lesbian separatist project in New South Wales that has been running since 1973.<br><i>The Endling</i> tells of an isolated, failing women’s separatist community. The story is told through Frankie, an ailing recluse who lives separate from the other women with her dog, and Mila, Frankie’s niece, who is trying to keep the women together in the face of the community’s likely end. Nearby, an orchid endling nears death and the subsequent extinction of its own species. As Frank gets progressively unwell and guarded about her condition, the women in the community mysteriously fall pregnant asexually. When Mila gives birth to the only boy, the hardline separatist politics of the community are put to the test.<br>In playing out the politics of feminist separatism, <i>The Endling</i> reveals ideological disparities, inherent limits to regeneration, and a fallible system of categorisation. It examines the instrumental relationship between sexual politics and the environments in which they are produced, suggesting a contingent and perpetual state of becoming. Influenced by the theories of queer failure and uncertainty described by Lee Edelman and José Esteban Muñoz, this story of feminist evolution, adaptation and extinction demonstrates how the borders we build in defining identity, sexuality and the human can be breached not only from without but from within, and are, eventually, bound to fail.<br>The exegetical component elaborates on the theory to which the fiction responds. It focuses on an enduring lesbian separatist project known as Amazon Acres. Located in New South Wales, on a subtropical mountaintop property, the project faces imminent cessation after fifty years. The thesis focuses on a moment in the mountain’s history involving the pursuit of parthenogenesis, suggesting significant links between utopian feminism, failure and renewal. Turning to the queer and feminist archival theories of Ann Cvetkovich and Maryanne Dever, I position the project as both a failed utopia and a queer archive to examine the limits of regeneration inherent to this feminist project’s model. Chapter One of the exegesis gives a brief overview of the mountain’s history including the reasons for its establishment, the restrictive cultural landscape from which it was born, a description of what the project looks like today, and my own fraught affiliation with the place. The chief research questions are as follows:<br>- What effect/affect does an archive’s materiality have on the knowledge it offers?<br>- How does queer failure and uncertainty inform or generate queer epistemologies?<br>- What can the medium of fiction offer the queer archive?<br>- How can it flesh out queer histories and feminist utopias?<br>- What ethical approach should the fiction writer take when critiquing feminist histories and adding to queer archives?<br><i>Chapter Two </i>describes how the archive of Amazon Acres pushes against traditional forms of archive. I visit The Australian Queer Archives in pursuit of a specific Radicalesbian document and discover an initially insignificant but ultimately valuable artefact. <i>Chapter Three</i> looks more closely at archival failure as a generative force regarding queer knowledges. It identifies deviation as a critical concept as regards those conditions. <i>Chapter Four</i> examines the ideological and philosophical influence of earlier feminist fictions on the way Amazon Acres operates. The boy child is analysed as a figure of deviance.<i> The Conclusion</i> gives a summation of the thesis, identifying the chief theories with which it engages, and ends with a hopeful, future-oriented image of the document as a contribution to the archive of Amazon Acres.