Starting the Q-Files Project: International LGBTIQ Bibliographical System
23.08.2007
For the last 17 years, having an intense economic and civic transition in the Eastern part of Europe, and before that having loads of non-governmental and philanthropic finance capital to support the establishment of regional minoritarian cultures and discourses, a multitude of NGO-supported literatures were financed, published, and ultimately stayed in a virtual existence. The reasons behind these are complex and this project seeks to address them in practice and not in theory.
These publishing and distribution processes, however loosely influencing any given local context, refer with much more intensity to the lives and literatures of LGBTIQ people not just in Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe in this case represents the utmost exacerbation of the problem. Since queer literatures, be it NGO-funded or not, were supported during the so-called 'transition' - yet suspiciously marginalized for more complex and contextual reasons – one realizes how unimportant and useless their publishing is. But is it? One could either wonder why this is so or else initiate a context for reflecting these particular queer literatures. Q-Files represent precisely this citational initiation.
The Q-Files project opens with a Bulgarian online version and realization of what constitutes the project itself: namely, referring and citing already existing and published queer(-related) literatures.
In 1999 American philosopher Judith Butler, reflecting on the reception of her infamous milestone-book Gender Trouble, articulated something called "theoretical activism". This wording could in actual fact describe the ground for writing, creating, and citing bodies of literatures that deal with new or oddly outdated problems in (a) a discursive regime of thinking and trans-cultural / trans-continental productions and (b) in not imagined, yet existing styles of writing, inscribing, reflecting upon issues that seem to be discursively unruly and unapproachable as to be identified by the hitherto known academic apparatuses and their knowledgable mechanic pundits. – Q-Files seek to integrate this Butlerian insight.
The project is taking aim at the practical elaboration of or else checking the possibility for such a "theoretical activism" whilst re-articulating the vision that theory, humanities, social sciences are a living experience that matters and makes a strong case for LGBTIQ people. This project, in both its structure and discursive context pretends to reflect and realize what was in actual fact touched upon by Judith Butler herself in 1999 and onwards and what, however sadly, is often perversely rendered as both non-existing and useless (insurrectionary) knowledge - depending on a given discursive academic or non-governmental "need".
Thus, Q-Files seeks to lay hold in reality both itself as a plane of registration (by citing, referring, reflecting queer publications) and the already existing queer literatures wherever these exist and are made insignificant. The Q-Files Project is the plane of registration, a real registration apparatus for citing and popularizing LGBTIQ literatures in the context of such a theoretical activism.
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Q-Files is the second project of Bulgarian organization LGBT Idea (www.lgbt-idea.org)
For more detailed information about the project, how you can contribute to expand it and how do you develop it IN YOUR LANGUAGE ONLY, visit the English page at www.qfiles.net which is the terminal flesh for this project.
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Stanimir Panayotov
LGBT Idea, International Relations
stanimir@lgbt-idea.org
