This chapter is a reflection on researching in police archives—specifically, the Instituto de Clasificación, now housed in Argentina’s Penitentiary Museum Antonio Ballve. There, given that no photographs of written transcriptions were permitted, the author had to record himself reading archival documents out loud in order to make a copy of them. Reflecting on his experiences of reading out prisoners’ responses to psychological tests, in front of the archival authorities, Fernández-Galeano theorizes the performance of archival sources as a generative archival method arguing that “the performance of dissonant voices” enables us to “better appreciate ambivalence in the face of surveillance.” As becomes clear, ambivalence— the resistance to easy scrutiny—forms a key part of queer (archival) survival.

Taking turns as both researcher and as the archival subject under scrutiny, Fernández-Galeano identifies how queer archival work is often propelled by ambiguous, pulsing turns flicking from guilt to desire and back again: between “the guilt that I feel for using sources that are the direct result of state violence” and “my desire to access the stories that they contain” lies a complicated archiving pleasure.