[Commlist] CFP - Returning to the Page: Visualising Design and Desire in Fan Magazines

*Returning to the Page: Visualising Design and Desire in Fan Magazines*
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8-13 February 2021

Keynote: Sally Stein, Professor Emerita, University of California, Irvine

This conference is designed as a sequel to our 2015 event/Turning the 
Page: Digitization, movie magazines and historical audience studies/. 
That conference focused on the development of the study of historical 
fan magazines in recent decades, with a particular emphasis on the 
impact of increased digitization (by the Media History Digital Library, 
among others) on this development. In this context, we particularly 
emphasised the importance of “reclaiming” the fan magazine – an 
ephemeral and often academically neglected object – as an important 
research tool for the study of stars, fans, Hollywood and non-Hollywood 
film industries and cultures, and more.

The purpose of this follow-up event is two-fold. Firstly, we wish to 
investigate the ways in which the field of historical fan magazine 
studies has evolved over the past five years. Secondly, we wish to 
focus, for this event, specifically on the design of the magazines and 
the relationship between the visual aspects of the publications and 
their contents. This choice is partly motivated by the online nature of 
the conference: since we will all be consuming the conference papers on 
a small screen, this format is excellently suited to an in-depth and 
detailed study of magazines’ visual elements.

With this focus, we particularly want to emphasise the importance of 
talking about the fan magazine holistically, as a complete and 
multi-layered object often consumed by its original readers in 
unorthodox and non-linear ways. As Sally Stein noted in the context of 
Ladies Home Journal in 1985:

    "Studies of magazines have usually treated literary texts, or
    editorial images, or ads, as independent entities, and have
    proceeded to analyze their meanings divorced from their original
    context. This strategy flattens our conception of the way magazines
    came to be assembled and then received. For these elements are
    certainly not apprehended in isolation; rather images and texts, ads
    and editorial matter, are each designed to work off each other
    within the larger ensemble of the magazine." (Stein, 1985: 7)


While some scholars have appreciated this importance of taking a 
holistic approach, we believe that much coverage of the fan magazine as 
a research object still tends to treat the visual and textual elements 
as easily separable from each other, failing to appreciate the holistic 
reading experience these periodicals offered their readers, who often 
consumed them in their available “scraps of time.” (Stein, 1985: 6)

The organisers are delighted to announce that an online exhibition 
devoted to movie magazines will be held at the same time as the 
conference. “Design and Desire: The Glamorous History of the Movie 
Magazine” relates the history of the movie magazine from its modest 
beginnings in New York in 1911, via its global spread and glamorous 
heyday in the 1930s, to its decline and absorption into the celebrity 
gossip publications we know today. In their heyday in the 1930s, there 
were more than twenty movie magazines released every month in the USA 
alone. Providing information on new releases but even more on their 
stars, movie magazines purveyed more than - often dubious - facts: 
primarily they sold dreams, just as movies themselves did. This 
exhibition relates the story of these glamorous publications through 
displays, maps, music, films and interactive features.

We welcome abstracts of 350 words for recorded PowerPoint presentations, 
as well as video essays or other digitally shareable innovative 
approaches. The conference, which is free to attend, will make selected 
presentations available asynchronously, while a number of scheduled live 
sessions will also be organised via the Zoom platform, including a 
roundtable focusing on archives and digitization.

We encourage colleagues to consult the excellent online collections of 
movie magazines at https://lantern.mediahist.org/ and www.archive.org, 
amongst others, in preparing their submissions.

Presentation topics may include but are not limited to:

  * Visual analysis of a historically significant single magazine
  * Synchronic or diachronic investigation of multiple magazines
  * Comparisons of different magazines’ treatment of specific stars,
    films or products
  * Assessments of magazines’ different reading strategies
  * Consideration of the dominance of Photoplay in recent scholarly work
    on movie magazines
  * Approaches to studying the fan magazine in the age of the pandemic
  * Examinations of the importance of the magazine cover

The closing date for submissions is midnight (BST) on 20 November, and 
authors will be notified of acceptance by 4 December 2020. Recorded 
presentations will be due by mid-January 2021. Please submit your 
abstract to (normma.network /at/ gmail.com).

Conference organisers: Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Lies Lanckman and Sarah 
Polley

Twitter: @design_desire
Instagram: design_desire2020
www.normmanetwork.com

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