Archival Kinship: Trans and Queer Kin-Making Memory Practices in Argentina

LGBTQ+ community archives have multiplied across Latin America in the last few decades. Bringing together people from different identities, ages and social trajectories, these archives have worked to disrupt normative historical narratives and to interrogate how to pass embodied experience to new generations. Drawing on ethnographic archival research in Argentine LGBTQ+ community archives, this article examines how, through practices of collection, classification and display, LGBTQ+ people built kin across generations. The article introduces the concept of archival kinship to analyse how kin is enacted and made through practices of archiving, connecting people through memory work mediated by documents and objects. As a concept, archival kinship is used to make legible how kin acts as a force of erasure; as an articulator of collections, mediating what gets archived and remembered; and as mutuality of being, a practice through which people co-constitute one another through shared objects, documents and memories. The concept contributes to sociological studies of kinship that move beyond hierarchies of legitimacy that prioritise biological ties to make legible other meaningful relationships such as chosen families and friendships, and shows the role of material culture in kin formation.