[Commlist] Conference - Audience Lost: Minority Women and Spectatorship

We are pleased to let you know that registration for Audience Lost: 
Minority Women and Spectatorship is now open! Please find more 
information about this exciting event below, with a full programme 
available at https://audiencelost.wordpress.com/programme/.

The conference will be free of charge, but we do ask interested 
attendees to register by emailing us 
at (womenspectatorship.conf /at/ gmail.com). Thank you - we're looking forward 
to seeing you there!

*AUDIENCE LOST: MINORITY WOMEN AND SPECTATORSHIP*
22-23 November 2019, Ghent, Belgium

Keynote speakers:
Prof. Judith Thissen, Utrecht University
Prof. Allyson Nadia Field, University of Chicago

In 2002, Annette Kuhn reflected, in Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema 
and Cultural Memory, that in regards to 1930s British cinemagoers, “we 
hardly know these people at all” (2002, 3); Jackie Stacey (1994, 49) 
focusing on British female movie fans of the 1940s and 1950s, made a 
similar observation in 1994, when she noted that “there is a history of 
female cinematic spectatorship which has yet to be written.” In their 
respective works, both scholars used sources such as magazines, 
questionnaires and interviews to begin to write exactly that history.

This conference wishes to build upon this observation that “we hardly 
know these people at all” by expanding its meaning in terms of the 
people involved, both in terms of time and in terms of demographics. We 
therefore invite papers focusing on marginalised female audiences in the 
broadest sense, and interpret this in two distinct ways.

Firstly, we seek to hear from scholars focusing on rediscovering or 
uncovering particular audiences, marginalised vis-à-vis the texts they 
consumed through racial, ethnic or religious identity, through 
geographic or linguistic distance, through sexual orientation or gender 
identity, through disability status, through social class, etc. This 
includes a demographic analysis of such audiences, an examination of 
their specific and varied fan practices and attitudes, the 
intersectional identities of certain audience members, etc. It also 
includes, however, broader contemplations on the very notion of the 
“marginalised” audience.

Firstly: if we are indeed all, as Henry Forman wrote in 1933, 
“movie-made”, what, then, does it mean to be “made” by movies or media 
texts specifically aimed at demographic groups with a privilege 
inaccessible to many other audience members? Secondly, we are keen to 
acknowledge and discuss the methodological challenges involved in 
studying such audiences, and the ways in which difficulties in terms of 
scholarly research may essentially serve to marginalise the group in 
question further. Thirdly, we wish to invite auto-ethnographic 
reflections from scholars working on such research topics, while also 
members of one or more marginalised groups themselves.

While the organisers’ own research is rooted within a film-historical 
context, and indeed we are very interested in hearing from those engaged 
in rediscovering lost historical audiences, we also invite submissions 
from those working on contemporary LGBTQ+, disabled, or 
racial/ethnic/religious minority women spectators. We particularly hope 
to reach out to scholars working within the multidisciplinary field of 
fan studies, where much fascinating work has been done, in recent years, 
on examining the practices of such audiences, as well as their 
relationship to traditional conceptions of fandom (such scholars include 
Kristen J. Warner, Rukmini Pande, Julie Levin Russo, Eve Ng, and 
others). While film and television history and fan studies have largely 
operated in distinct and separate spheres from one another, we believe 
the disciplines can come together in fruitful and methodologically 
interesting ways in order to allow us a more complete picture of these 
often invisible fans.

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