It is almost impossible to disentangle the impact of colonisation from both queer bodies and archival practices. Achille Mbembe says there is no such an archive as “secular”. An archive is primarily the product of judgment, the result of the exercise of a specific power and authority. The archive is fundamentally a matter of discrimination and selection, the results in the granting of privileging status to certain documents, and the refusal of the same status to others. Archive as a system of discursivity, as developed by Michelle Foucault (1972) which is inextricably connected with power and knowledge, it becomes obvious how it is in the interests of power to present a particular view on the history and what is considered as “fulfilling the criteria of archivability”.
The use of state libraries is still affected by the existing stigma around LGBTIQ people. Personal prejudices of librarians and hegemonic library classification structures affect the dignified representation of marginalised groups. Libraries are using structured vocabularies that fail to respectfully organise materials about LGBTIQ groups. Patrons, using this structure to find related information about LGBTIQ people, inevitably learn negative stereotypes about the community. The archives and libraries are shaped by power, authority and discrimination. Social process reproduces the marginalization of LGBTIQ materials in archives and libraries.
With my PhD thesis, by creative work, I want to address these issues. I aim to challenge this hegemony of power and knowledge through creating a digital LGBTIQA+ archive for a community-led collection and preservation of LGBTIQ culture and history.

Renee Dixson is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. She works within the Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Research where she aims to develop a prototype of a crowdsourced digital queer archive designed to support collections and preservation of LGBTIQ history in Australia and Ukraine.
Prior to coming to Australia, she had established the first in the region LGBTIQ NGO and worked there for 5 years. However, she was forced to leave Ukraine. With her work in Australia, she is continuing to help the queer community in Ukraine. Additionally, she and her partner are running a peer support and advocacy group for queer refugee women in Australia.
Renee’s research interests are the digital humanities, decolonisation of knowledge, feminist theory, and the intersection of gender, sexuality and refugee status.

Renee Dixson, Developing a crowdsourced Digital Queer Archive: challenging knowledge hegemonies and hierarchies of normative archival practices, PhD candidate, Renee.Dixson@anu.edu.au