There is a robust and growing literature around community-engaged archaeology, highlighting the importance of such projects. However, few projects have meaningfully engaged with LGBTQ+ communities and queer heritage. In this interdisciplinary collaboration between an archaeologist (Jenn Lupu) and a performance studies scholar and archivist (Benjamin Zender), we put forth a community-centered approach to the study of archaeological objects through creative writing exercises. In 2018, we hosted a collaborative community event in the form of a free creative writing workshop. Attendees engaged with archaeological artifacts from a collection associated with a possible Prohibition-era queer household and party scene. In this paper, we discuss the workshop, drawing from community-archaeology, queer theory, and archival studies literatures; present a detailed lesson plan with creative writing activities; and showcase selections from participants’ writing. Our project is one method for doing community-engaged archaeology work that centers queer stakeholders. Community members engaged with archaeological materials through a queer lens, in relation to their own identities and experiences. The use of creative writing exercises disrupts the sexual, gender, race, and class normativities of traditional archaeological methods to produce new possibilities for queer readings of the past.

The National Black Doll Museum of History of Culture was founded by Black sisters Debra Britt, Felicia Walker, and Tamara Mattison. From 2012 to 2020, the Museum operated in Mansfield, Massachusetts, a predominantly white suburb of Boston. Based on performance ethnographies and oral history interviews, this essay offers the Museum as a case study of archival precarity and institutionality in independent, grassroots minoritarian archives. I analyze how Britt and her sisters transformed a personal collection of Black dolls into a public museum, illuminating the inextricability of their pedagogical work from their life histories. Written following the Museum’s closure in 2020, I return to the site of its former reconstructed trans-Atlantic slave ship hold, built by Britt and her family within a small storage closet in the original Mansfield location. The Hold offers a central illustration for how Britt produced a museum on a tiny budget and a tight deadline, staging historical reenactment and reflexive engagement to foster affective and epistemological transformation.

In this article I used queer of color performance theory and Black feminist theory to read photographs by Black queer photographer Lyle Ashton Harris and a short film by white trans artist Cassils. I demonstrate that each pieces stages queer repertoires of joy and survival that exceed the frame of individual photographs.

I co-edited this volume of critical essays, memoir, op-eds, and creative non-fiction. The book is the foundation of the UMass Amherst Writing Program curriculum and is used by over 3000 students each year.