Collecting, Cruising, Feeling: Exploring the Contemporary Queer Archival Fever in Italy

One-day bilingual symposium (English and Italian)

This symposium focuses on the rapidly expanding field of Italian queer archival scholarship and practices. It brings together and stages a dialogue between scholars and archivists, scholars of Italian queer archives working within and outside of Italy, and scholars working in and across the fields of Gender, Queer, and Trans Studies, Italian Studies, and Archival Studies.

Some of the specific questions that we will address are: What is a queer archive in Italy, and how is it organized and maintained? What silences persist within Italian queer archives and how are these silences critically addressed? How do Italian queer archives deal with the contradictory combination of marginalisation and precarious institutionalisation (often through bottom-up activist and community efforts)? What is the impact of new academic interest on such institutionally precarious archives? And how does the precarity of Gender, Queer, and Trans Studies themselves in the Italian context affect the study of queer archives? Finally, what contributions can the study of Italian queer archives make to the larger, transnational field of queer archival scholarship?