This session invites 15-20-minute papers that attend to the partial and resistant ways queerness and transness emerge in medieval archives. Torn pages, smudged images, misplaced marginalia, and fragmentary traces all signal forms of queer archival participation. In reimagining archival potential how might medievalists access, interpret, or refuse archival legibility? Contributions may address explicitly socio-political queer identities and communities, as well as approaching the archive itself as a site structured by both queer and trans abundance and absence. The session welcomes interdisciplinary approaches that reconsider how scholars encounter, interpret, preserve, and reimagine archives beyond inherited frameworks of organization, memory, and scholarly proximity.

As queer and trans studies continue to reshape medieval scholarship, this session asks how archival methodologies themselves might be reconsidered. Building on Brian Schram’s claim that queerness offers “a potent antidote to the oppressive regimes of categorization,” the panel explores how queer and trans approaches challenge normative systems of preservation, legibility, and historical interpretation. The session is timely in its emphasis on archival structures, silences, and fragmentary traces as sites of inquiry, encouraging medievalists to think critically about how archives produce, obscure, or resist categories of identity, memory, and power.

Abstract length limit: 300 words