This thesis project examines Skeivt Arkiv, Norway’s national queer archive at the University of Bergen Library and argues that it is best understood as a state-supported performance site where queer archival care is co-performed through mediated queer encounter. Queer theory has often framed the queer archive as a contradiction in terms: the archive fixes and categorizes, while queerness moves and exceeds. Drawing on Diana Taylor’s performative pair, the “archive” and the “repertoire,” and on research conducted at the archive in September 2025, this project asks how queerness and the state is similarly co-performed—by whom, for whom, with what objects of memory, and toward what future. The thesis situates Skeivt Arkiv’s rapid, state-funded founding (2012–2015) against both the community-archive tradition of North America and the seductions of Norwegian exceptionalism. It then specifies the practices of queer archival care—preservation, relational, interpretive, and bodily—through which the archive performs its work, reading them through José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification, Elizabeth Freeman’s erotohistoriography, and the dialogic co-performance of Dwight Conquergood and D. Soyini Madison, before turning to the linguistic capaciousness of the name Skeivt arkiv itself. Its methodological contribution, co-cruising, extends Simon Ofield’s and Steven Paige’s work on cruising the archive by relocating cruising from a solitary practice of detection to a dialogic co-performance among researcher, archivist, and object. The method is tested on six objects from the collection. The thesis concludes that Skeivt Arkiv becomes skeiv not through its holdings but through its performances, keeping queer history open to encounters—and futures—that are not yet here.

Advisory Committee:
Olivia Noble Gunn, Chair
Amanda Doxtater
Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud