"Turning Archival traces the rise of "the archive" as an object of historical desire and study within queer studies. Highlighting the growing significance of the archival to LGBTQ scholarship, politics, and everyday life, the contributors draw upon multidisciplinary, geopolitically diverse, and embodied accounts of queer archival encounters in institutional, grassroots, and everyday repositories of historical memory. By analyzing how the many turns to the archives shape the relationship of the historical to queer forms of knowledge, evidence, and worldmaking, this book theorizes the notion of turning in performative terms as a way of understanding how meaning gets produced through encounters with archival materials. Drawing on a range of perspectives-from postcolonial, performance, trans, disability, and cultural studies-this collection examines the archival turn within queer studies and how it has fostered historical imagination and knowledge. Together, the contributors provide personal and critical reflections on the allure of the archives, on that which resists archival capture, and on what is at stake for queer and trans lives in these archival turns."--