This issue of Radical History Review explores how activists, archivists, and scholars— in engaging grassroots and institutional LGBT archiving efforts and questions of digitization, systems of classification, migration and paperwork, criminal records, postcolonialism, performance, photography, museums, and historical methods—have radically opened up the notion of the queer archive. The essays work to identify, and then fracture, the assembly and systematization of archival knowledge regarding sexualities and gender.

Though the terms “queer” and “Mennonite” rarely come into theoretical or cultural contact, over the last several decades writers and scholars in the United States and Canada have built a body of queer Mennonite literature that shifts these identities into conversation. In this volume, Daniel Shank Cruz brings this growing genre into a critical focus, bridging the gaps between queer theory, literary criticism, and Mennonite literature. Cruz focuses his analysis on recent Mennonite-authored literary texts that espouse queer theoretical principles, including Christina Penner’s Widows of Hamilton House, Wes Funk’s Wes Side Story, and Sofia Samatar’s Tender. These works argue for the existence of a “queer Mennonite” identity on the basis of shared values: a commitment to social justice, a rejection of binaries, the importance of creative approaches to conflict resolution, and the practice of mutual aid, especially in resisting oppression. Through his analysis, Cruz encourages those engaging with both Mennonite and queer literary criticism to explore the opportunity for conversation and overlap between the two fields. By arguing for engagement between these two identities and highlighting the aspects of Mennonitism that are inherently “queer,” Cruz gives much-needed attention to an emerging subfield of Mennonite literature. This volume makes a new and important intervention into the fields of queer theory, literary studies, Mennonite studies, and religious studies.

Over the course of the last half century, queer history has developed as a collaborative project involving academic researchers, community scholars, and the public. Initially rejected by most colleges and universities, queer history was sustained for many years by community-based contributors and audiences. Academic activism eventually made a place for queer history within higher education, which in turn helped queer historians become more influential in politics, law, and society. Through a collection of essays written over three decades by award-winning historian Marc Stein, Queer Public History charts the evolution of queer historical interventions in the academic sphere and explores the development of publicly oriented queer historical scholarship. From the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and the rise of queer activism in the 1990s to debates about queer immigration, same-sex marriage, and the politics of gay pride in the early twenty-first century, Stein introduces readers to key themes in queer public history. A manifesto for renewed partnerships between academic and community-based historians, strengthened linkages between queer public history and LGBT scholarly activism, and increased public support for historical research on gender and sexuality, this anthology reconsiders and reimagines the past, present, and future of queer public history.

In an era when the metaphor of the archive is invoked to cover almost any kind of memory, collection or accumulation, it is important to re-examine what is entailed—politically and methodologically—in the practice of feminist archival research. This question is central not only to the renewed interest many disciplines are showing in empirical research in archives but also given the current explosion of online social and cultural data which has fundamentally transformed what we understand an archive to be. Contributors in this collection are keen to mark out what may be novel and what is enduring in the ways in which feminist thought and feminist practice frame archives. Importantly, they engage with archives in their historical and political complexity rather than treating them as simple repositories of source material. In this respect, contributors are keenly interested in what it means to archive particular materials, and not simply in what those materials may hold for feminist researchers. The collection features established and emerging feminist scholars and brings together interventions from across such disciplines as history, literature, modernist studies, cinema studies and law. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Australian Feminist Studies.

The archive has assumed a new significance in the history of sex, and this book visits a series of such archives, including the Kinsey Institute’s erotic art; gay masturbatory journals in the New York Public Library; the private archive of an amateur pornographer; and one man’s lifetime photographic dossier on Baltimore hustlers. Shedding new light on American sexual history, the topics covered are both fascinating and wide-ranging: the art history of homoeroticism; casual sex before hooking-up; transgender; New York queer sex; masturbation; pornography; sex in the city. This book will appeal to a wide readership: those interested in American studies, sexuality studies, contemporary history, the history of sex, psychology, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, queer studies, trans studies, pornography studies, visual studies, museum studies, and media studies.

“How do I prove I’m gay?” This is the central question for many refugee claimants who are claiming asylum on the basis of sexual orientation persecution. But what are the inherent challenges in obtaining this proof? How is the system that assesses this predicated upon homonormative frameworks and nervous borders? What is the impact of gender, race and class? What is an ‘authentic’ sexual or gender identity and how can it be performed? Real Queer? is an ethnographic examination of the Canadian refugee apparatus analysing the social, cultural, political and affective dimensions of a legal and bureaucratic process predicated on separating the ‘authentic’ from the ‘bogus’ LGBT refugee. Through interviews, conversations and participant observation with various participants ranging from refugee claimants to their lawyers, Refugee Protection Division staff and local support group workers, it reveals the ways in which sexuality simultaneously disrupts and is folded into the nation-state’s dynamic modes of gate-keeping, citizenship and identity-making, and the uneven effects of these discourses and practices on this category of transnational migrants.

Reckoning with History brings together original essays from a diverse group of historians who consider how writing about the past can engage with the urgent issues of the present. The contributors—all former students of the distinguished Columbia University historian Eric Foner—explore the uses and politics of history through key episodes across a wide range of struggles for freedom. They shed new light on how different groups have defined and fought for freedom throughout American history, as well as the ways in which the ideal of freedom remains unrealized today. Covering a broad range of topics, these essays offer insight into how historians practice their craft in different ways and illuminate what it means to be a socially and politically engaged historian.