If Memory Serves

“The Quare in the Square”: Queer Memory, Sensibilities, and Oscar Wilde

“…Memory can also be productive because it is "incomplete, fragmented, affect-saturated, and … continually open to the imaginative processes of rearticulation, reinvention, and adaptation." 43 As such, it is more directly aligned with the multiplicities of queer theory, postmodernism, and genealogical methods that history as a discipline has been slower to embrace. 44 In addition, rather than constrain historical insights by limiting what counts as sound documentation, memory embraces "ephemeral and personal collections of objects" such that they might "stand alongside the documents of the dominant culture in order to offer alternative modes of knowledge."…”

“…55 Indeed, given the fragmentary, creative, and contestable nature of memory, some queer memory scholars have suggested that criticisms about anachronistic memories are "beside the point." 56 While this total disavowal of historicism is too brazen-I would argue that the move to memory should not become grounds to promote a fanciful fiction when other, more accurate and more productive memories also exist-it does seem there are productive ways to reconsider anachronism as a rhetorical resource, not just a threat.…”

AIDS melodrama now: Queer tears in It’s a Sin and Pose

“…AIDS Crisis Revisitation began as a queer archival project that sought to challenge the ‘unremembering’ (Castiglia and Reed, 2011) of AIDS in the United States (Davies, 2012; Schulman, 2021). As blockbuster fictions designed to move and even astonish their audience, It’s a Sin and Pose constitute the melodramatization of these politics of memory.…”