Conference - Destined for Men: Visual Materials for Male Audiences, 1750 - 1880 (Worcester, MA; Oct. 16-17)

With presentations on caricatures and other illustrations, this conference might be of interest to comics scholars.

Destined for Men:
Visual Materials for Male Audiences,
1750 - 1880

October 16-17, 2009
American Antiquarian Society
Worcester, Massachusetts

Through the emergence of women's studies programs in academic institutions in the past generation or two, many aspects of women's lives have been documented through publications and academic courses. The third conference of the Center for Historic American Visual Culture focuses not on women but on men. Looking at examples of visual materials of and for men is a way to look at a different gendered audience. In the literature on American graphic materials, little has been written about the audience for historical images. The papers presented at this conference begin to address this need.

The presentations by scholars from a variety of disciplines address images of the male body, public portraiture, prints and illustrations for male audiences, boxing, erotica, using drawings as examples of friendship among men, and men and fashion advertisements. Speakers include curators, librarians, historians, art historians, and literary scholars.

Joshua Brown, executive director of the American Social History Project, located in the Graduate Center of The City University of New York, will present "Catching His Eye: The Sporting Male Pictorial Press in the Gilded Age," the Twenty-Seventh James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture at 6:00 p.m. on Friday, October 16.

Between the final session and the Wiggins Lecture, there will be time to view selected materials from the graphic arts collection in the Council Room in Antiquarian Hall

For the schedule of presentations, see the conference website, which is also the source for the illustration above.

CFP: Desiring the Text, Touching the Past: Towards An Erotics of Reception (Bristoll UK: Nov. 30; July 10)

Note that this CFP specifically addresses those working on visual texts and those working on fan culture. I think papers on comics would fit in well here...

Call for Papers

Desiring the Text, Touching the Past:
Towards An Erotics of Reception

A one-day conference co-organized by
the Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition
& the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto

University of Bristol, 10 July 2010

Keynote Speaker:
Professor Carolyn Dinshaw, NYU

In reading Cicero’s letters I felt charmed and offended in equal measure. Indeed, beside myself, in a fit of anger I wrote to him as if he were a friend and contemporary of mine, forgetting, as it were, the gap of time, with a familiarity appropriate to my intimate acquaintance with his thought; and I pointed out those things he had written that had offended me.
(Petrarch, Rerum Familiarum Liber I.1.42)

Love, desire, fannish obsession and emotional identification as modes of engaging with texts, characters and authors are often framed as illegitimate and transgressive: excessive, subjective, lacking in scholarly rigour. Yet such modes of relating to texts and pasts persist, across widely different historical periods and cultural contexts. Many classical and medieval authors recount embodied and highly emotional encounters with religious, fictional or historical characters, while modern and postmodern practices of reception and reading – from high art to the subcultural practices of media fandom – are characterized by desire in all its ambivalent complexity. Theories of readership and reception, however, sometimes seem unable to move beyond an antagonistic model: cultural studies sees resistant audiences struggling to gain control of or to overwrite an ideologically loaded text, while literary models of reception have young poets fighting to assert their poetic autonomy vis-à-vis the paternal authority of their literary ancestors.

This conference aims, by contrast, to begin to elaborate a theory of the erotics of reception. It will bring together scholars working in and across various disciplines to share research into reading, writing and viewing practices characterized by love, identification, and desire: we hope that it will lead to the establishment of an international research network and the formulation of some long-term research projects. In order to facilitate discussion at the conference, we will ask participants to circulate full papers (around 5,000 words) in May 2010.

We now invite abstracts of 300 words, to be submitted by email by 30 November 2009. Abstracts will be assessed on the basis of their theoretical and interdisciplinary interest. We particularly welcome contributions from scholars working on literary, visual and performance texts in the fields of: history, reception studies, mediaeval studies, fan studies, cultural studies, theology, and literary/critical theory.

Some ideas which might be addressed include, but are not limited to:

• Writing oneself into the text: self-insertion and empathetic identification
• Historical desire: does the historian desire the past?
• Hermeneutics and erotics
• Pleasures of the text, pleasures of the body: (how) are embodied responses to the text gendered?
• Anachronistic reading: does desire disturb chronology?
• Erotics and/or eristics: love-hate relationships with texts

This conference is part of the ‘Thinking Reciprocity’ series and will follow directly from the conference ‘Reception and the Gift of Beauty’ (Bristol, 8-9 July 2010). Reduced fees will be offered to people attending both conferences.

If you have any queries, or to submit an abstract, please contact one of the conference organizers:
Dr Ika Willis (Ika.Willis@bristol.ac.uk);
Anna Wilson (anna.wilson@utoronto.ca).