This dissertation investigates archival work concerning the history and preservation of queer games and play experiences. Current scholarship in archival practice, queer history, and game studies focus on archival methods, the history of games in general, or the queerness of games in the present, without a specific focus on the intersection of archives and preservation of games and play experiences. This study therefore asks the following questions: What efforts are being made in game studies to preserve the history of games and those who play them? What do those methods look like in comparison to an archive of queer games constructed by and concerning the experiences of queer people? What can game studies do to more accurately preserve and lift up the voices of marginalized groups in gaming culture? To answer these questions I developed a six move methodology that interweaves interdisciplinary areas, including archival practice, queer theory, games history, and the lived experience of the author as a queer and transgender individual: 1) Weaving methodological strands together; 2) Defining a transparent method for insider research; 3) Decolonizing and redefining axes of marginalization; 4) Integrating queerness, game studies, and interdisciplinarity; 5) Turning to the archives; and 6) Enacting and maintaining activism, advocacy, and community. The study conducts two case studies examining efforts in archiving and preservation to lift up the voices of marginalized people, taking place at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, and the all-digital LGBTQ+ Video Game Archive, respectively. The cases find that both archives engage in efforts to preserve queer gaming history to not only preserve history but look to the future and how to best serve marginalized populations. This occurs through collaboration between communities and sharing resources between archives and examining the interaction between the Strong and the LGBTQ+ Video Game Archive provides insight into practical methods for preserving and lifting up marginalized voices in gaming history, including larger archives providing resources to assist smaller archives with access and long-term storage. Collaborative efforts to preserve specific queer video games such as <i>Caper in the Castro</i> provide specific examples of the two archives working together towards ensuring queer game history is preserved and accessible to scholars and gamers in the future. Highlighting the collaborative work and connections between the case studies demonstrates that the methods in use to preserve queer history rely on queer archival practices like community interaction and collaboration to best serve marginalized communities in the preservation of their histories and experiences

“Feeling Historical,” examines why history has played such a central role in the construction of queer identities by analyzing how same-sex desiring individuals, particularly elite white individuals, in the U.S. looked to history to construct and navigate their own sexual identities. My project begins in the late nineteenth-century U.S., when history took on new cultural significance in the United States. Americans, previously more preoccupied with the future than the past, became engrossed in finding truth in history and origins. Parallel to this preoccupation with the past was the emergence of modern notions of sexual identity and the rise of the new sexual science of “sexology.” For sexologists, same-sex desire was new, a product of modernity and degeneration in which the sexually deviant fell behind on the evolutionary ladder. “Feeling Historical” analyzes the cultural and racialized work of white queer individuals who pushed back against such pathologizing discourse, arguing that their sexual affinities were not something aberrant, connected to degenerate desires of the racial other. Instead, they positioned themselves as rooted in a complex whitewashed transnational and transhistorical past. Mobilizing the past to construct their present, these individuals often drew on orientalist histories of great ancient civilizations in which they believed same-sex desire was accepted and even celebrated. They did so to not only counter the homophobic violence they experienced in their own time but to also reclaim their privileged racial identities. Much cultural work went into the construction of such a queer history. Using an interdisciplinary framework linking history, memory studies, queer theory, performance studies, visual culture studies, and critical race studies, I examine how these individuals appropriated examples of same-sex desire in the history, literature, and art of Ancient Greece, Italy, and the Middle East with imperialist understandings of such cultures. I ask which histories they found useful, and how gender, race, class, and ethnicity informed their historical reclamations. Through acts of history writing, auto-biography, performance, sexual tourism, and the creation of queer archives, I argue that such same-sex desiring individuals used history to not only navigate their identities and carve out spaces in a hostile world where they could survive and even thrive, but also reclaim their racial privilege by fashioning a queer identity based on a past that positioned queerness as inherently white.

The demands of WWII mobilization led to the creation of the first standing women's army in the US known as the Women's Army Corps (WAC). An unintended consequence of this was that the WAC provided queer women with an environment with which to explore their gender and sexuality while also giving them the cover of respectability and service that protected them from harsh societal repercussions. They could eschew family for their military careers. They could wear masculine clothing, exhibit a masculine demeanor, and engage in a homosocial environment without being seen as subversive to the American way of life. Quite the contrary: the outside world saw them as helping to protect their country. This paper looks at the life of one such queer soldier, Dorothee Gore. Dorothee's letters, journals, and memorabilia demonstrate that for many lesbians of her generation, service in the WACS during WWII was a time of relatively open camaraderie and acceptance by straight society.

What is queer? What is queer? What is queer theory? Where can it go from here? This thesis sets out to explore the origins and influences of queer theory before investigating the present and the future spaces (ie, bodies and settlements) it can potentially move into. Three distinct experiments of fieldwork and ethnographic filmmaking test the truths and potentialities of queer theory when relating to queer bodies and settlements. That is to say that each chapter balances a film and its supporting text by embracing the value and urgency of practice led research. The first chapter questions queer history and details the importance of emerging trans politics in the post-gender, leftist, avant-garde, queer activist and militant space of Bologna. Queer bodies, case one: transgender and transsexual perspectives. Settlements, case one: Bologna and Lido di Classe (Italy). The second chapter considers the interface between disability theory and queer theory with particular attention paid to the practical theory of ‘curative education’. Defined by Rudolf Steiner in 1922 and further developed by Karl König with the foundation of the Camphill movement in 1944, curative education privileges the social model over the medical model in the field of disability so that disability is in fact ability. Queer bodies, case two: learning differences and disabilities perspectives. Settlements, case two: Berlin (Germany), Chatou and La Rochelle (France), Barry and Glasallt Fawr (Wales, United Kingdom). The third chapter uses queer perspectives to promote the relevance of quantum physics to the human body, thus involving contemporary dance, physical theatre and the arts more generally to address and redress the chiasm between science and technology on the one hand, and arts, humanities and socio-cultural sciences on the other. Queer bodies, case three: the inescapably queer reality of the physical world. Settlements, case three: multiple locations in Tuscany (Italy), and Thamesmead, London (England, United Kingdom). This thesis brings notions of queer and otherness deceptively close to notions of the self. Otherness and queerness become mirrors in which our own queerness comes into view.

Many queers are drawn to ‘the city’, as an (imagined) more progressive, and queered space. Its urbanity may offer anonymity as well as community. A major city means both the presence of diversity, of other queers, as well as possibly a queered understanding of ‘the city’ itself, with rich queer histories and cultures ingrained into the public and private realm. But then again, the realities within the city of Berlin is often a different one. Finding community that works, a multitude of exclusions plus the need for safer spaces make it harder to connect and are part of the experience of queer community. I try to understand the queerness within the feeling of yearning, of trying to find a place where one belongs and connect it with the feelings of disappointment and loneliness. I conducted interviews following a semi-guided structure. In their analysis, I hope to understand how urban queer loneliness is experienced and understood.

This thesis is an exploration of queer domesticity, queer possibility and intuitionin historic house museums. It develops a methodological framework intended to intervene in archival, research, interpretive and institutional practices at these sites. Using the Elfreth’s Alley Museum’s podcast The Alley Cast as a case study, I examine how utilizing a framework that understands queerness to be just as possible as straightness; that uses intuition to guide research; and queer and trans theory to denaturalize categories of sexuality and gender can uncover queer domestic patterns that unsettle and disrupt the public’s hetero- and cisnormative assumptions about the past. I argue that this is a framework that can be adopted by historic house museums in order to engage with queer history when evidence may be lacking or whose historical subjects’ gender or sexuality resists easy classification. Finally, I argue that implementing such a framework can only be done successfully if it is engaged as part of a larger institution-wide commitment to creating a socially just and responsive museum that understands the importance of sharing complicated and difficult history with its public and dismantling its own position of power and authority. / History

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This thesis aims to generate a model to answer why there is a notable gap in legislative action with regards to expanding and modernizing LGBTQIA+ rights between Sweden and Denmark and the other Nordic countries, groups described by Jens Rydström as the Progressive Core and Conservative Periphery respectively. In order to do so, there is an analysis of the applicability of Rydström’s model to legislative history. This legal review is then applied to the shared colonial experiences of Norway, Iceland, Finland, and the Faroe Islands to generate the beginnings of an explanatory model. The model is then complexified by using the shared colonialist past as an exemplar of lost state capacity before and after independence. This model of lost state capacity is then applied not only to the above gap, but also to the even larger legislative gap between action in the above groups and in a new category consisting of Finland and the Faroe Islands. The last step is an in-depth application of this model to the Finnish case in comparison to the Progressive Core and the Conservative Periphery. This is accomplished in two ways: first through a content analysis of party platforms from five separate eras of Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian politics, and, secondly, through a qualitative analysis of the legislative action data.

It is a difficult task to interpret historical silences, to investigate subjects that are largely missing in the archives. However, the writing of history must not stop because of that, but with the help of the small amount of material that exists, research must move forward and create more knowledge. One purpose of the essay is precisely this, to contribute with inspiration and knowledge about working with limited materials from marginalized groups. This particular essay is about lesbian living conditions during the 1940s in Stockholm and this is examined using documents from a police investigation during the time, that convicted five women by the swedish law against homosexuality, "fornication that is against nature". This court case is unique as it is the first case in swedish legal history where women have been convicted of homosexual acts. The source material is examined using text analysis, queer theory, queer phenomenology and gender theory. Through this method and theory formation, lesbian living conditions are studied based on factors such as identity, community, norms and attitudes. The main results show that the prevailing heteronormativity and gender order were both limiting and liberating for gay women in different situations and that there were different attitudes towards female homosexuality. The various investigated categories are also woven together in the final discussion and their connections and influence on each other are made visible. With this essay, the goal is to contribute to the research of historical lesbian living conditions as well as to contribute with historical role models for lesbians today.

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