Join us online or in person for a seminar with Kate Davison

On Abandoning Archival ‘Melancholy’ and Embracing Queer Abundance, or, Who’s Afraid of Anjali Arondekar?

In this paper, I will outline some of my research on LGBTQ+ aversion therapy and explain why a queer methodological approach to source materials has been indispensable and aligns with Anjali Arondekar’s (2023) recent provocation for us to abandon ‘melancholy historicism’ and instead conceive of sexuality and its archives as sites of abundance.

For many scholars of queer history, assuming an effervescent posture may feel discombobulating. The proverbial conundrum lamented by early gay historians compelled by archival scarcity to subvert police and court records in constructing histories from below, continues to loom large over the field. And yet, ‘to fix sexuality within vernaculars of loss’, suggests Arondekar, ‘(while politically exigent) is to refuse alternative historiographical models, to bypass imaginative histories of sexuality, full of intrepid archives and acts of invention’. Add to this the imposing weight of methodological tradition within the historical profession, evident in the high praise afforded to those who, in pursuit of ‘thoroughness’, draw firm boundaries around their ‘archive’, as though primary sources are akin to ‘data sets’ and only complete ones will do. My work has by necessity taken an undisciplined (aka slutty, queer) approach to source materials, discarding neat borders in favour of a messier assemblage of psychiatric literature, queer archival repositories, oral histories, objects, private papers, ad hoc correspondence and other primary detritus. Far from lamenting the absence of an impossibility – an unmediated queer voice from the past, in my case first person contemporary accounts by LGBTQ+ ‘patients’ who underwent aversion therapy – I incorporate multifocal reading and listening strategies, including from the history of emotions, to make an abundance of ‘voices’ audible, thereby enabling more capacious history writing. Queerly embracing abundance simultaneously affords greater ‘thoroughness’ while radically eschewing its necessity.

30th April 2025, 11am AEDT

Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC1.108
Zoom: Click here

Dr Kate Davison is Lecturer in the History of Sexuality at the University of Edinburgh. She was previously Lecturer in Queer History at Goldsmiths, University of London. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Melbourne and previously worked as an editor and translator for the Centre for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. Her first book, Aversion Therapy: Sex, Psychiatry and the Cold War, will be published by Cambridge University Press.