[Commlist] CFP: Audience Lost: Minority Women and Spectatorship

*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.

Potential topics can include, but are not limited to:

•       Historical perspectives on cinemagoing in ethnic communities
•       Immigrant spectatorship
•       The consumption of Hollywood movies by minority women
•       LGBTQ+ fandoms
•       Methodologies to access historically lost audiences
•       Film archives and the marginalised audience
•       Black women as movie fans
•       Disability and spectatorship
•       Studies of film reception amongst specific religious groups
•       Women-only film screenings and film clubs
•       Characteristics of marginalised spectatorship
•       The methodological challenges in examining female audiences
•       Theorising lesbian spectatorship
•       Working class women and the movies
•       Women and film criticism
•       Gender and race-specific viewing pleasures
•       National minorities and cinema culture
•       Girlhood and fandom
•       Geographically specific viewing practices

We invite abstracts of no more than 300 words for 20-minute papers, as 
well as panel proposals for pre-constituted panels (consisting of three 
papers). Conference attendance will be free of charge.

Send your proposal and a short bio to Lies Lanckman and Agata Frymus at 
womenspectatorship.conf@gmail by 30 June 2019. The conference website 
can be found at https://audiencelost.wordpress.com/.

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