Printing is a queer art in the sense its 16th-century meanings: queer as in “perverse,” since it disrupted the norms of how information was reproduced at the time; and queer as in “off-center,” since it is has allowed for the survival of marginalized voices and experiences. Recently, printing is “queer” in the sense that the campaign to recognize LGBTQ+ rights has required activists to design, print, and circulate their own materials in the face of censorship and persecution. This lecture links these histories of queer printing. As a case study, we’ll look at the printing practices of 17th-century Quakers as they have survived over the past 350 years, informing the practices and politics of contemporary LGBTQ+ publishing. One the one hand, 20th-century activism lends a few concepts that might benefit the historian or bibliographer, and on the other hand, exploring the history of “queer” in the distant past provides a longer, deeper history that has long been denied to the LGBTQ+ community.
Brooke Sylvia Palmieri is a writer, educator, and bookseller. In the summer of 2018 she completed her PhD at University College London, “Compelling Reading: The Circulation of Quaker Texts 1650-1700,” which focused on the relationship between the archives Quakers maintained to document their experiences of persecution, and the collectively written works they published based on those experiences. She is the editor of Printing History, the Journal of the American Printing History Association (printinghistory.org), and the proprietor of Camp Books (campbooks.biz), a travelling bookshop that specializes in LGBTQ+ history.
Date:
Thursday, November 15, 2018, 5:30 PM
Lecture followed by a reception.
Location:
Houghton Library.