Queer Modernist Weapons of the Weak

This review of Jill Richards’s The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes situates the text within recent strains of queer modernist studies as well as longstanding theorizations of queer resistance. Closely reading one of Richards’s primary case studies, Claude Cahun, I argue that The Fury Archives patterns its thinking off of anthropologist James C. Scott’s concept of “weapons of the weak.” As a key critical analytic for LGBT/queer studies, these modes of defiance course through Richards’s activist monograph via both its modernist content and its scholarly form.