Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories

The first book to focus on the experience of LGBT archival research. Out of the Closet, Into the Archives takes readers inside the experience of how it feels to do queer archival research and queer research in the archive. The archive, much like the closet, exposes various levels of public and privateness—recognition, awareness, refusal, impulse, disclosure, framing, silence, cultural intelligibility—each mediated and determined through subjective insider/outsider ways of knowing. The contributors draw on their experiences conducting research in disciplines such as sociology, African American studies, English, communications, performance studies, anthropology, and women’s and gender studies. These essays challenge scholars to engage with their affective experience of being in the archive, illuminating how the space of the archive requires a different kind of deeply personal, embodied research. Amy L. Stone is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Trinity University and author of Gay Rights at the Ballot Box. Jaime Cantrell is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi.