Call for papers: Queer Bibliography workshop

QUEER BIBLIOGRAPHY: TOOLS, METHODS, PRACTICES, APPROACHES 

With my colleague Sarah Pyke, I am arranging a workshop in London in February 2023, and am pleased to share the CfP below.

Call for papers for a symposium at Senate House, University of London, 4 February 2023*

Participants are invited to an optional practice-based workshop on 5 February 2023, venue TBC

Sexuality and textuality are tightly bound. From our earliest experiences of media –including print – LGBTQI+ individuals are employing queer interpretative methods and navigating the ways queer identities might be ‘read’ by others. And yet, while literature’s constitutive effect on queer subjectivities is relatively well-worked ground, how exactly print objects inform, acknowledge, embody and produce queer identities and communities is understudied in bibliographic terms. Queer/ing book history is a project that has been advanced both inside and outside the academy (The Queer Book course at London Rare Books School, devised and taught by Brooke Palmieri; Javier Samper Vendrell and Vance Byrd’s edited collection Queer Print Cultures, forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press, to give just two examples), but queer bibliography, as a specific orientation to studying printed matter, remains relatively uncodified within traditional, published scholarship. Historically, bibliography has tended to marginalise non-canonical experiences and materials, as Kate Ozment points out (“Rationale for Feminist Bibliography”, 2020).

In recent years, however, work on feminist, liberation and Black bibliography from Ozment, Leslie Howsam, Sarah Werner, Derrick Spires and Dorothy Berry, among others, has pointed to bibliography’s radical potential and its force for remaking the broader field of book studies. Drawing on the interventions and energies of this work, this symposium invites sustained discussion of bibliographical tools, practices, methods and approaches that are, in some way, distinctively queer. We are interested less in content and more in materiality, as well as in the intersection of material and theoretical engagements with print objects.

We welcome contributions from any field and every career stage: postgraduates, early career academics, established and independent scholars, librarians, archivists, activists, book arts practitioners. We invite proposals that consider – but are not limited to – the following questions:

• What can we learn from the uses made of the book-object by queer or LGBTQI+ individuals – borrowing, returning, sharing or owning books; the book as medium and emblem of instruction, enlightenment, comfort, escape, survival?
• How is the labour of queer or LGBTQI+ editors, publishers, designers, proofreaders, illustrators, librarians, archivists and bibliographers understood and accounted for?
• How do queer practices of anthologising, compilation or common-placing signify bibliographically?
• How do desire and/or recognition function in histories of queer book collecting and possession?
• How might bibliography attend to bodily, social and affective practices of reading and book use? How might print objects be handled queerly?
• How have queer books been catalogued and shelved? How do print objects queer existing institutional and classificatory norms?
• How might queer theory and/or queer as mode or method be brought into dialogue with bibliographic practice and material-cultural approaches to the history of the book?
• How can queer approaches – given that ‘queer’ is often also implicitly white and/or cis-male – inform intersectional work that attends also to the raced, classed, gendered and colonial aspects of the material book and the field of book studies?

To maximize time for discussion we anticipate pre-circulated papers of approximately 2,500 words will be read in advance by all attendees. We also welcome non-essay contributions, especially from practitioners, including participation in roundtables or other alternative formats. And finally: our aim is to increase the visible, citable work on this topic. We will propose an edited collection once the symposium programme is confirmed. When submitting your abstract, feel free to indicate your interest in this.

To submit, please send a 300 word abstract (for a 20 minute paper or alternative contribution) and a 100 word bio to Sarah Pyke and Malcolm Noble at queerbibliography@gmail.com by 11:59pm (GMT) on 23 September 2022.

*Some practical info: We are exploring hybrid options and will provide more information in the coming months. We want to keep costs low. There will be no registration fee, although we anticipate a small charge for refreshments and for the optional workshop event.