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IN THIS FORUM, I SHARE TWO research anecdotes from Mexico-each originating from my current project, Archiving the Obscene: Censorship, Erotica, and Pornography in Latin America, 1700-1955-that gesture to the growing diversity of methodological and theoretical tools through which to conceptualize and write histories of sexuality in Latin America and from an interdisciplinary Latin Americanist perspective. These anecdotes point to those entangled, embodied archival engagements that aim to expand the scope and methods of the history of sexuality by merging critical self-reflexivity to historical narration through interdisciplinary tools and archival thinking. Both "archive stories" revolve around the preservation and archiving of early to mid-twentieth-century Latin American pornographic textual, photographic, and moving image records.1 Archiving the Obscene focuses on the largely neglected production, distribution, and circulation of censored objects, texts, images, and films in Latin America from the early eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
The aims of this long-term project are twofold and will culminate in the publication of a traditional scholarly monograph, as well as in the creation of a digital repository that has become a necessary precondition for the research itself. This book aims to be the first of its kind to trace the unstable and constantly shifting notions of obscenity in Latin American history. It will also be the first to digitally archive a growing corpus of Latin American print, photographic, and moving image records related to histories of sexuality for researchers and students. Yet the achievement of these two interrelated intellectual goals has necessitated training (in the UCLA Department of Information Studies) in the increasingly technical fields of information studies and the digital humanities, which has helped me understand archives from an archivist's perspective rather than solely from that of the historian and archive user. By making possible new disciplinary training in the Held of library and information studies (LIS), a New Directions Fellowship funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has profoundly reshaped how I, a historian of sexuality, can both engage and participate in the very processes of records appraisal, conservation, metadata creation, description and cataloging, and digital archiving.
My focus in this long-term project, as with my reflection for this Journal of the History of Sexuality forum, is in part on the symbiotic institutional and grassroots efforts to archive and...