Queer Bibliography and The Queer Book
Two events of interest in this area are coming up in the next few months. Firstly, the University of North Carolina's Rare Book Collection’s long-running The Hanes Lecture Series in Bibliography continues with Dr. Brooke Palmieri and Kadin Henningsen's lecture Bibliography’s Backroom: Four Encounters.
It will consider the history of Queer printing and print cultures and alongside it will be a printing workshop, Imprinting the Body, hosted by the Rare Book Collection and the John C. Henry Print Studio at the Hanes Art Center. The lecture will be held at 5:30 pm on March 31 in Wilson Library’s Pleasants Family Assembly Room and will be livestreamed. Registration details here.
Kadin Henningsen is an artist-printer and Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studies nineteenth-century American literature, book history and Transgender Studies. He is the owner of Meanwhile…Letterpress, a letterpress studio focused on producing work by, for and about trans and queer communities.
Dr Brooke Palmieri is an artist, writer and educator working at the intersection of memory, history and rampant gender-bending alternate realities. In 2018 they founded CAMP BOOKS, a platform and traveling bookshop promoting access to queer history through prints and zines; workshops and installations; and the collaborative construction of archives related to LGBTQIA+ activism and the long history of gender non-conformity.
They developed The Queer Book course at London Rare Book School in 2017, and Palmieri will be running the course again this year at Senate House, London, during week one, June 19 - July 7, 2023 in person. More details here about the course and registration. According to the course information:
"The purpose of this course is to re-evaluate the development of mechanical printing processes in terms of contingency rather than inevitability, strangeness rather than familiarity, and above all, in the moments when format and speedy dissemination are harnessed to disrupt normative culture. Consequently, “the book” and its attendant fields of bibliography and the materiality of texts have much to benefit from queer theory, where concepts of queerness might be used to think about books in relation to the bodies that produce and consume them, and in relation to the norms print culture might create and/or resist. By considering innovations upon printing practices over the past 500 years, highlights in the history of book production from blasphemous texts to contemporary artists’ books and zines, and media that centres the experiences of gender non-conforming people, the goal of the course is that students might delight in the queerness of information exchange."
