Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Call For Papers: Publishing Queer/Queer Publishing





Submission Deadline: Friday 17th November 2017
Conference Date: Friday 16th March 2018

Location: University of London, Senate House Library

Senate House Library is calling for papers on queer publishing for presentation at a 1 day conference taking place at Senate House in March 2018.

The conference forms part of the events programme for the exhibition ‘Queer Between the Covers’, held at Senate House Library from January to June 2018.

The presence of queer works on twentieth century publishers’ lists tended to represent complex processes of equivocation, marked by streams of open titillation and multi-layered camouflage. Novels of queer love could be presented by mainstream firms as examining
‘social problems,’ released by pulp presses with lurid covers promising erotic excitement, printed in severely limited and expensive editions to avoid censure, or offered to the public by imprints more accustomed to gambling against censorship with works pornographic in their intent and content. This fragmented world, driven by simultaneous repression of and prurient interest in queer lifestyles, means that it is difficult to delineate a broad history of queer publishing.

This conference seeks to engender as broad a discussion as possible of the area in an English language context, and welcomes proposals from researchers in multiple disciplines. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Evading censorship
• Criminal proceedings, and the fear of them
• Histories of specific presses
• Publishing case studies of individual texts or authors
• Cloaking and camouflage – the disguised queer story
• Tensions between published scripts and dramatic performance
• Dealing with ‘underground’ presses
• Pulp novels
• Histories of queer pornography
• Classical influences, ‘Uranians’ and other cliques

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers. To submit a paper, please send abstracts of up to 250 words to shl.whatson@london.ac.uk

Details from here.

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