Reimagining the Erased in an Era of Transfixion

The concept of ‘erasure’ is, in the 2020s, an issue of dispute in the area of gender and sexuality; but erasure is an inevitable consequence of the boundary of ‘living memory’ creeping forward. Things that once seemed ephemeral or trivial escape documentation and are missed from historical record, though they would broaden, brighten, and add flavour to our knowledge of the past. As a consequence they become unavailable to later researchers. This chapter looks at the decades under study and asks the difficult question of what might have been erased, addressing the lack of or ambiguity in vocabulary to describe adequately the nuances of sexuality, gender, and the grey areas where they overlap that we recognise today, but which may not have been expressed before or may have been expressed differently. Using modern writing such as the 2020 novel LOTE by Shola von Reinhold, Anna Funder's book Wifedom (2023), and the short stories of Juliet Jacques ( Variations , 2021), as critical texts for the period, and drawing on phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard's tenet that imagination is an essential part of memory, this chapter argues that imagination is also a vital tool to unite historian and novelist in recovering what has been erased, ignored, or unrecorded.