Archives and futurities

 

In thinking genealogically about my uncle, my family, my life, and my queerness, I am surely misusing Foucault’s understanding of genealogy as an analytic, a methodological intervention. In the philosopher’s hands, genealogies trace how thoughts are made thinkable. In my own way, though, I am trying to trace how I have become thinkable to myself. And if I literalize the concept of genealogy to think about a family member, someone part of my actual genealogy, I do so not to reveal a history but to historicize it. That is, I want to show its contingencies, its foibles, its simultaneous openings and foreclosings on other ways of understanding itself. Again, if genealogy "disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself" ("Nietzsche" 139), then my construction of a queer lineage between my uncle and me, however phantasmic and fraught with reality and illusion, is an attempt to dislodge me from the force of family and a genealogical imperative that would not have made much room for my queerness.

 

To be clear, though, my approach here is not to find a home for that queerness as much as it is a recognition that queerness is always already in the making. As such, I might counter the tracing of a genealogy with the assemblage of an archive, a stash of stuff out of which new lines of force and meaning can be made. Ann Cvetkovich has written powerfully about such archives, particularly those emanating from traumatic experience, such as familial rejection, which

 

puts pressure on conventional forms of documentation, representation, and commemoration, giving rise to new genres of expression, such as testimony, and new forms of monuments, rituals, and performances that can call into being collective witnesses and publics. It thus demands an unusual archive, whose materials, in pointing to trauma's ephemerality, are themselves frequently ephemeral. (7)

 

This site is part of my archive, a webbed network of linkages that both metaphorize and materialize the relations through which I have come to make a life.

 

Or at least part of one.

 

Other stories need to be told. I’ve barely mentioned my father. And my mother deserves so much more, my sisters too. But in narrowing my vision for a little, I try to make clearer to myself the opacities, the absences, the phantasms that are the creative stuff of living re-creation. Heather Love, recognizing the need of many queers to move forward, offers a useful caution:

 

Given the scene of destruction at our backs, queers feel compelled to keep moving on toward a brighter future. At the same time, the history of queer experience has made this resolute orientation toward the future difficult to sustain. (162)