‘History that matters’: an affective historiography of ‘queer’ at the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives in 1990s Australia

This article canvasses highly affective rejections of the term ‘queer’ at the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (ALGA) in the 1990s. Several ALGA members and supporters saw the word ‘queer’ as a threat to their socialist and feminist analyses of oppression and social change. Importantly, these rejections also defended a particular historical narrative about the labour and achievements of the gay and lesbian activism that championed these analyses in prior decades. Following queer bibliography, I argue that we can excavate the affective dimensions of these rejections in the 1990s print material that ALGA members and supporters produced, circulated, and later archived. Grievance, defensiveness, and anxiety simmer in this material. Accordingly, we might understand these ALGA members’ rejections of ‘queer’ as part of what Kadji Amin calls the ‘dense affective histories’ of ‘queer’. I tentatively posit that we might also understand these rejections as part of the dense affective historiographies of ‘queer’.