Collecting, Cruising, Feeling: Exploring the Contemporary Queer Archival Fever in Italy

Organising Committee: Monica Jansen, Gianmaria Colpani, Graziana Marziliano, Irene Villa.

Italy is witnessing a wave of renewed interest in queer archival collections, proven by initiatives such as the first national meeting of the Italian LGBTQIA+ Archives Network, hosted by the Cassero LGBT+ Center in the Spring of 2024, in Bologna. At the same time, Italian queer archives are attracting unprecedented scholarly attention (e.g., Biagini 2018; Prearo 2015; Pustianaz 2021; Sbaffi 2023; Voli and Virtù 2023). This one-day symposium aims at interrogating this current archival fever in its complexity and multidimensionality (Arondekar et al. 2015). In order to do so, it brings together and stages a dialogue between: a) scholars and archivists; b) scholars of Italian queer archives working within and outside of Italy; c) scholars working in the fields of Gender, Queer, and Trans Studies, Italian Studies, and Archival Studies and cutting across the disciplinary boundaries between History, Literary Studies, Sociology, Political Philosophy, and…