[ecrea] cfp: Feverish Collections: Porn and Libraries

Feverish Collections: Libraries&  Porn

Lisa Sloniowski, Associate Librarian, York University Libraries
Bobby Noble, Associate Professor, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies.

In her 1991 collection, Libraries, Erotica, and Pornography, Martha Cornog wrote
that libraries were in a state of chaos with regard to pornography, torn between
an anti-censorship ethos on the one hand, and on the other, a view of its
collections as repositories of social and literary value and librarians as
arbiters of ‘good taste’ (Oryx Press). Her collection paved the way for a more
nuanced understanding of these issues, provided important practical
bibliographies for collection developers, and argued that libraries were
central to historical definitions of pornography and that pornography was
central to understanding the history of libraries.

Almost 25 years later however, many new questions pertaining to the relationship
of libraries, archives, sex, sexuality, the body, the digital, and pornography
have emerged, prompted by ongoing debates in both feminist and queer theories
and porn studies communities. New work proposes we look at porn not as a social
problem but as a form of cultural production. Proposals are invited for an
exciting new edited collection exploring the intersections of Porn Studies,
feminist theory, queer theory, archival theory and information studies.

The collection will consider the ways in which the introduction or existence of
sexually explicit material in libraries and archives works to disrupt
conventional collections, appraisal, preservation, access and cataloguing
practices, and what such disruptions reveal about the social and intellectual
spaces dedicated to the stewardship and production of knowledge. Archivist
Marcel
Barriault once asked, “how can archives be bodies of knowledge without
knowledge of the body?” (Archivaria 68) Our collection seeks to explore the
body in relation to the archive and in our explorations, strip bare the logics
and technologies of archivization which contribute to sexual regulation, moral
panics, and erasures of the sexual subject.

At the same time we wish to also encourage generative readings of the archive
which might allow us to understand how activist interventions in institutional
archives and libraries may offer space for transgression inside the larger
hegemonic structures in which they are enmeshed.

With this in mind proposals are invited for essays of 5000-7000 words exploring
topics such as (but not limited to):

*Porn-as-method - what does the collection of porn do to the library and
its schema, taxonomies?
*Alternatively, library-as-method - what does archivization do to porn?
*How might feminist porn, queer porn, and/or transgender porn offer
unique challenges to libraries and archives?
*How might the porn archive/library be read as the spatialization of sex,
and sexual knowledges?
*How do we reconcile the demands for Internet filtering in public
libraries vs. questions of access?
*What is the role of The Library in relation to sexual regulation and
moral panics?
*How are new technologies (eg., digital archives and online commercial
porn “tubes”) effecting the challenge and theory of digital preservation?
*In what ways can archives become sites of colonization or
decolonization? Can re-classification schemas undo the racism of porn?
*Do standardized library classification schemas and other scholarly
framings undermine or further extend the embodied provocations of porn? How
might we think about porn and genre?
*How might porn collections include the voices and perspectives of porn
producers, directors, and actors?
*In what ways are archives/collections reflective of or even constituted
by processes of racialization? How might sexually explicit materials counteract
or reify such racialization?
*Who is the subject doing the collecting? How might we theorize the image
and geneaology of the ‘sexy’ librarian? What do we make of the subgenre of
librarians/archivists in porn or libraries/archives as porn settings?
*Is there a way to conceptualize the building of personal collections as
a fetish/sexual practice?
*In what ways is the discursive, for instance, archival theory and the
fetish of the archive, staging challenges around the limits of metaphor in
relation to the material practices of archives and libraries?
*How does ‘fair trade porn’ or ‘ethical porn’ overlap with debates
around, and the challenges of, open access debates?
*How do porn collections in national libraries and archives operate in
the sexual construction (and regulation) of nation and nationalism? Are
anti-colonial collection development practices possible?
*How do we negotiate privacy concerns in the public sex archive?
*In what ways do corporate online archives of amateur porn reposition
“real” porn as realism?
*What is the scholarly and historical value, if any, of these
collections?

We seek papers from academics, librarians, archivists, collectors, sex workers
and cultural producers, grassroots library workers, and museumologists.

Bibliographic work listing and describing existing porn collections in libraries
and archives are also encouraged.

Please send proposals of no more than 500 words plus a short biography to
(feverishcollections /at/ gmail.com)  by June 30th, 2014.



Dr. Bobby Noble
Associate Professor
Director Undergraduate Programs
School of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies

132 Founders College
York University
Toronto ON M3J 1P3
Canada




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