This continues from another post…

Laura Doan’s research on Radclyffe Hall was brought to my attention by a historian (in-training) who, themselves, are building a methodology for a specifically queer form of historical research. Our common interests are keeping us in frequent contact building into an ongoing discussion on how we are discovering and defining queer in our research. Through him and in Doan I’m finding a kindred spirt. He and Doan are concerned with the intellectual affinities between queer studies and critical history, whereas I am interested in affinities between queer studies, critical history, and research-creation methodologies.

Disturbing Practices intended to explore the emergence of a ‘modern homosexuality’ Radclyffe Hall contributed to via the ambulance-driving lesbians portrayed in Miss Ogilvy and the well of loneliness. What unfolded in Doan’s study was a disturbance of ‘current practices in historicizing sexuality’ that took the better half of a decade to produce. By pulling the thread of Radclyffe Hall and her cohort of cosmopolitan afab’s mobilised by the opportunities war generate, Doan followed a mycelial network in the style of Anna Tsing that clarifies the simplicity and complexity that emerges when a queer subject is centred with critical historical methods. Or, to say it differently, the historical pursuit of the stereotypical 1920s lesbian ambulance driver demonstrates a lot about our own ‘projections’ on sexualities and genders of the past.

One point that drives her arguments is about the empiricist nature of ‘facts supporting arguments’ and what challenges this raises when a queer subject is at hand – confronted with queer theory’s affinities with post-structuralism and its aversion to objectivity makes it difficult to substantiate one argument or another when there is ‘no one truth’¹Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War, 40.. To explore this, she speaks to the correlation between methods and outcomes, citing that it is not just discipline but training that pre-determines outcomes. She speaks of ‘a scholar trained … in a pioneering (doctoral) program open to alternative configurations of historical practice’²Doan, 38. making implicit to the reader that a transdisciplinary reading of a historical subject, however queer, will always be an outlier and challenged by those anchored in their well-tested methods. Doan did not set out to write a monograph on the role training has played in various histories and cultural studies of queer folx, but rather, set out to investigate afab folx on the frontlines of world war one.

All of this from a piece of conflicting information between biography, memoir, and daybook involving Radclyffe Hall.

And in Doan I found a companion – addressing the complexity of disciplinary silos when queer subjects are involved is her concern as it is mine. This complexity is an ongoing challenge within the research here as it lacks the institutional support a ‘progressive lingers in a margin where a certain kind of flimsiness appears to most who’ve found homes and agency within disciplines whose methodologies are less opaque and easily citable for funders and other assessment apparati.

I am still in the archives with Doan as a companion and a cohort of others who confront the paradoxes that appear when marginalised lives are explored through institutional channels. A cohort of others who also find a generative use of personal experience in the rather ordinary experience of finding conflict in a queer archive.