Archival Erasure: How History Silences Sex, Gender, and Identity

When we talk about archival erasure, the systematic removal or ignoring of marginalized sexual and gender histories from official records. Also known as historical silencing, it’s not just about missing documents—it’s about who gets to decide what counts as history. Think of all the stories about sex, desire, and identity that never made it into textbooks, court records, or medical journals. Women’s self-pleasure? Buried under "female hysteria" diagnoses. Bisexual people? Erased by both straight and gay communities that demanded proof of loyalty. Trans and nonbinary ancestors? Rewritten as men or women to fit rigid categories. This isn’t accident. It’s strategy.

Archival erasure doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s tied to gendered narratives, the cultural rules that define what men and women should feel, do, or suppress. Victorian doctors called masturbation a disease. Medieval marriage records treated women as property transfers, not people with desires. Even today, research on female orgasm gets dismissed as "not necessary for reproduction," ignoring its evolutionary roots. Meanwhile, bisexual erasure, the refusal to acknowledge bisexuality as a real, stable identity keeps people invisible in LGBTQ+ spaces and medical studies alike. These aren’t old problems—they’re active patterns. The same forces that silenced Anne Koedt when she proved the clitoris was the center of female pleasure, or that banned Thomas Nashe’s dildo poem in 1592, still shape what gets archived and what gets thrown out.

What you’ll find here isn’t just history. It’s recovery. These articles dig up the buried: the steam-powered vibrators women used to treat "hysteria," the Etruscan tombs that celebrated sex as sacred, the police raids on gay bars that sparked revolutions, the legal battles that still fight for basic rights beyond marriage. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s repair. Every post here fights back against archival erasure by naming what was silenced, showing how it was hidden, and proving that these stories matter—not as footnotes, but as foundations.