UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation considers counter-institutional archives as social and political gathering places and interweaves spatial analyses of the forces of gentrification affecting the surrounding geographic context of these archival spaces. I developed a method called “queer hanging out” which addresses many related activities of knowledge production with varying stakes. Queer hanging out takes place across political affinities, within and while maintaining the movement spaces discussed in the chapters to follow. Chapter One traces three archival projects in Park Slope Brooklyn, New York, Interference Archive, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and Moncada Library. I analyze the development of these archives as political movement infrastructure resisting processes of displacement. As movement infrastructure I discuss archival preservation strategies, and programming as political education. Chapter Two discusses several projects in Barcelona to consider political labor, common vs. public space, archival histories, and futurity. In this chapter I think about two contemporary art pieces that were exhibited at the Centre d’Art Santa Mónica, alongside a social center in the Sants Neighborhood called Can Battló and two archives housed there, Fundacio Salvador Segui and Centre de Documentació de Moviment Socials Mercè Grenzner. In each of these examples I focus on how forms of political skepticism toward institutions give way to a political orientation called prefigurative politics. In Chapter Three I write about a recently closed counter-institutional archive in San Francisco, the Center for Sex and Culture (CSC). Already concerned over the preceding years about their ability to maintain the physical space in light of rising rents in the surrounding South of Market neighborhood, CSC’s all-volunteer collective spent two years planning the relocation of the archival materials. In the end, instead of dividing the materials according to contemporary categories and redistributing them to other counter-institutions, CSC’s collective decided to relocate the archive as a whole to Harvard’s Schlesinger library. The political decisions CSC members made explores questions around community-based archives and the ways they have become circumscribed under neoliberal capitalism. Counter-institutional spaces offer us the opportunity to land our rage, grief and solidarity among friends and those we share political affinity, and with whom we want to hang out.