What happens when a writer’s papers survive — or fail to survive — under institutional custody? The archive ceases to be mere context and intervenes in the author-function itself: it curates a self, an “I”; it defers publication; it produces oblique modes of self-figuration; and sometimes it becomes a work's sole mode of existence.

This seminar seeks to examine how the notion of authorship is permeated by the reading of personal archives of queer writers, including, but not exclusively, manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and ephemera. From its origin in the Latin ‘auctor’, authorship as a patriarchal institution has long been bound to what Adriana Cavarero calls the Western ethics of “rectitude.” Feminisms and the sexual dissident movements of the 1960s and 70s further shook its conceptual ground, contesting the presumed uprightness of the writing subject and questioning an epistemic, hermeneutic, and theoretical tradition of reading centered on a monolithic concept of the author — most famously defaced by Barthes’s death of the author. The archives and texts we gather are dissonant with that verticality: they lean, defer, self-efface, practicing inclined rather than upright modes of authorship. Yet the personal archive is itself an institution that threatens to reinstate the author as an authority figure, regulating, in a neoliberal context, the very possibilities of reading. We propose to read it instead as a complex entanglement of economies of desire and the politics of gender and sexuality. Drawing on Cvetkovich, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Farge, and Muñoz, we ask how archival existence shapes scenes of self-writing and genres of the self. Cases such as Gabriel Iturri — Robert de Montesquiou’s Argentine secretary, whose voice survives only in others' papers — José Bianco, whose archive was sold to Princeton by his heir, or Juan José Hernández, whose rights remain with his family, remind us that the archived self is always a mediated one.

We invite proposals that address custody and the appropriation of authorship: copyright, patrimony, and authors’ estates; permissions and heirs; the posthumous disclosure of sexuality; and the researcher's embodied responsibilities and challenges.

Papers might address:

• Personal archives as scenes of authorship and genres of the self
• Unpublished, truncated, or posthumous works
• Self-archiving, curation, and strategies of self-effacement
• Queer kinship and relational modes of archival inquiry
• Sexile and the dispersal of queer archives across institutions and borders

We welcome works on modern and contemporary literature (19th–21st centuries), especially Latin American materials — in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.