3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This First-Year Seminar offers an in-depth exploration of Baltimore’s queer and trans archives, expansively defined, engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship on "the archive" within queer and trans studies. Beginning with a brief survey of U.S. LGBTQ history, students delve into archival research methods and hands-on explorations in JHU Special Collections. We then engage with queer theory, performance studies, and public humanities scholarship to ask what we can know of the recoverable past and what silences the archive might contain, approaching the queer archive as a complex record of activity that includes ephemera of events, shows, and collective affect; innuendo and gossip; residues of queer nightlife; performance and gesture. We ground these theoretical explorations by visiting Baltimore-based institutional and non-institutional archives, where we engage with 1970s LGBT newspapers and 1960s medical documents, oral histories recorded by local trans artists, street youth photography, and the embodied archives of vogue performance. Throughout the course, we underscore the transformative potential of engaging with the queer and trans past to forge solidarities in the present and map more just and gorgeous futures.