queer studies Archives

Beyond Medieval Archives

Beyond Medieval Archives approaches the archive as a site of immense creative potential. It argues that, through new perspectives from Medieval Studies and creative practice, we can instigate a more diverse range of critical approaches in which the archive emerges as a space where revelation and discovery are haunted by the provocations of silence and omission. Contributions to this volume engage with archives as repositories existing within and beyond institutions, as more makeshift assemblies of materials and artefacts, and as conceptual and theoretical frameworks.

This collection expands the scope of the creative-critical archive by engaging the archive with and through medieval literature and culture. The volume includes critical essays, creative reflections, dialogue pieces and creative-critical collaborations from medievalists, poets, artists and writers. By placing creative practice and critical medievalist research about the archive into conversation, the book traces the emergence of medieval literature and culture in the modern and contemporary archive. We can use the postmedieval archive to reread, or reconfigure, the material of the medieval past and to examine how the archives of the Middle Ages are reforged through creative work. The book also includes engagements in archival acts that revive or incite new exchanges with the materials of the medieval past, while challenging understandings and intuitions about the issues of archival access.

Violent Affections

Violent Affections uncovers techniques of power that work to translate emotions into violence against queer people. Based on analysis of over 300 criminal cases of anti-queer violence in Russia before and after the introduction of ‘gay propaganda’ law, the book shows how violent acts are framed in emotional language by perpetrators during their criminal trials. It then utilises an original methodology of studying ‘legal memes’ and argues that these individual affective states are directly connected to the political violence aimed at queer lives more generally.

The main aim of Violent Affections is to explore the social mechanisms and techniques that impact anti-queer violence evidenced in the reviewed cases. Alexander Sasha Kondakov expands upon two sets of interdisciplinary literature – queer theory and affect theory – in order to conceptualise what is referred to as neo-disciplinary power. Taking the empirical observations from Russia as a starting point, he develops an original explanation of how contemporary power relations are changing from those of late modernity as envisioned by Foucault’s Panopticon to neo-disciplinary power relations of a much more fragmented, fluid and unstructured kind – the Memeticon.
The book traces how exactly affections circulate from body to body as a kind of virus and eventually invade the body that responds with violence. In this analytic effort, it draws on the arguments from memetics – the theory of how pieces of information pass on from one body to another as they thrive to survive by continuing to resonate. This work makes the argument truly interdisciplinary.

Queer Migration and Asylum in Europe

Europe is a popular destination for LGBTQ people seeking to escape discrimination and persecution. Yet, while European institutions have done much to promote the legal equality of sexual minorities and a number of states pride themselves on their acceptance of sexual diversity, the image of European tolerance and the reality faced by LGBTQ migrants and asylum seekers are often quite different.

To engage with these conflicting discourses, Queer Migration and Asylum in Europe brings together scholars from politics, sociology, urban studies, anthropology and law to analyse how and why queer individuals migrate to or seek asylum in Europe, as well as the legal, social and political frameworks they are forced to navigate to feel at home or to regularise their status in the destination societies. The subjects covered include LGBTQ Latino migrants’ relationship with queer and diasporic spaces in London; diasporic consciousness of queer Polish, Russian and Brazilian migrants in Berlin; the role of the Council of Europe in shaping legal and policy frameworks relating to queer migration and asylum; the challenges facing bisexual asylum seekers; queer asylum and homonationalism in the Netherlands; and the role of space, faith and LGBTQ organisations in Germany, Italy, the UK and France in supporting queer asylum seekers.