For many decolonial, feminist and queer thinkers, it is self-evident that archives are sites of many political decisions: decisions about accessioning material, cataloguing and access conditions. We might also think about the decisions made in the social encounters between the bodies that meet in these spaces. These embodied meetings seem to play a significant role in determining what is ‘revealed’ by the archives on that day. In this piece, I reflect on how the body I arrived in, before and after beginning my transition, produced starkly different experiences in an LGBTQ+ community archive. Much more was revealed to me upon my second visit in my rapidly masculinising body.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Eli Branagh (2026) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: