1 00:00:04,950 --> 00:00:10,829 Well. Hello, everyone. Welcome. It's really nice to see you. It's a beautiful day outside, but it's even better in here. 2 00:00:10,830 --> 00:00:16,469 So thanks for coming. My name is Adam Smith, and I'm the president of the Oxford Bibliographic Society. 3 00:00:16,470 --> 00:00:25,200 And this is our last event of the academic year. And this event, we're really looking forward to our discussion of career bibliography. 4 00:00:25,440 --> 00:00:30,810 We've got two great speakers, Malcolm Noble, preferred speakers, unfortunately, and so he won't be joining us today, 5 00:00:31,380 --> 00:00:38,580 but we're joined by Sarah and James and we'll have presentations from each of them 6 00:00:39,390 --> 00:00:43,500 and then we'll have a discussion and then we'll open an out and out to the room. 7 00:00:43,500 --> 00:00:47,069 There's lots of you here in the room, which is great. There's lots of you online as well. 8 00:00:47,070 --> 00:00:52,110 So thank you for thank you for being here. I'll introduce our speakers now. 9 00:00:52,770 --> 00:00:56,730 Dr. Sarah Pike is an associate research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, 10 00:00:57,600 --> 00:01:01,560 working on queer book history, histories of reading and children's literature. 11 00:01:02,160 --> 00:01:08,880 And earlier this year, Sarah convened with Malcolm the Queer Bibliography Symposium of the Year, the IEEE. 12 00:01:09,030 --> 00:01:14,639 So this event today in some ways follows on from that takes its initiative from Matt and Sarah will be 13 00:01:14,640 --> 00:01:20,580 teaching a London rare book school course this summer on the material possibilities of children's books, 14 00:01:21,870 --> 00:01:23,040 which looks fantastic. 15 00:01:23,130 --> 00:01:33,090 And Sarah is also working on a project about Operation Tiger, the early 1980s raids by Her Majesty's Customs on gays, the word bookshop in Bloomsbury, 16 00:01:33,090 --> 00:01:40,649 London, and as a recipient of this year's short 25th Anniversary Fellowship Award to work on that particular project. 17 00:01:40,650 --> 00:01:47,190 And Sarah is also going to be the Mumby fellow in bibliography in Cambridge for 2023 2024. 18 00:01:48,930 --> 00:01:56,910 JD Sargeant, trained at Queen Mary, University of London and here in Oxford is held postdoctoral fellowship at University 19 00:01:57,000 --> 00:02:02,070 of Toronto in Durham and is now a research fellow at the University of Limerick. 20 00:02:02,970 --> 00:02:07,170 He's the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook to the History of the Book in Medieval Western Europe, 21 00:02:07,650 --> 00:02:14,820 which is out in 2025, I think, and the cultural history of trans lives in the Middle Ages out in 2027. 22 00:02:15,840 --> 00:02:24,569 Jones is currently writing two other books. Reading early middle English books is a history of poor Eastern reading practices in 12th and 23 00:02:24,570 --> 00:02:30,750 13th century England and Trends histories of the medieval book experiments in bibliography. 24 00:02:31,020 --> 00:02:38,220 She's a methodological reassessment that takes its cues from queer and trans studies and critical theory, and is an article. 25 00:02:38,310 --> 00:02:41,700 What could a trans book history look like towards trans code? 26 00:02:41,700 --> 00:02:44,730 Ecology comes out next week. Really? Next week? 27 00:02:45,300 --> 00:02:51,480 Next week in a special double issue of criticism on new approaches to critical bibliography, 28 00:02:51,480 --> 00:02:56,440 which looks like a fantastic thing that we will need to read this summer. 29 00:02:56,490 --> 00:03:02,130 That wasn't enough. This summer, James will be teaching a California rare book school course in queer bibliography, 30 00:03:02,370 --> 00:03:07,440 and from August he will be assistant professor in the English department at the University of Georgia. 31 00:03:09,450 --> 00:03:24,850 So without further ado. So thank you very much, Adam, for that generous introduction and for the invitation to speak. 32 00:03:24,910 --> 00:03:28,300 It's really exciting to see so many people here in the room. 33 00:03:28,330 --> 00:03:33,040 And I know that when Zoom as well. I can't see you. 34 00:03:34,480 --> 00:03:41,530 I think you have maybe a slightly odd view of my chin, but that's okay. 35 00:03:43,840 --> 00:03:48,670 On the publicity materials for this event, we posed several questions, 36 00:03:49,060 --> 00:03:53,050 but I can't promise that you will have answers to all of them at the end of this. 37 00:03:53,860 --> 00:04:00,820 Perhaps unsurprisingly, as with anything prefaced with queer, we. 38 00:04:02,450 --> 00:04:06,830 Won't be offering any hard and fast definitions of this emerging field. 39 00:04:08,600 --> 00:04:12,290 Rather, we'll try to name excessive caring affiliate practices, 40 00:04:12,290 --> 00:04:22,639 methods and tools that might be used both to examine clear printed material that is, material that fits over content or through its production, 41 00:04:22,640 --> 00:04:31,610 circulation or reception lends itself to being read as created and to examine any material otherwise in ways which, 42 00:04:31,610 --> 00:04:37,280 drawing on queer theory, adapt and expand existing bibliographic historical protocols. 43 00:04:38,150 --> 00:04:46,510 This is both about the design for a queer bibliography and the desire to queer bibliography and that relation 44 00:04:46,520 --> 00:04:53,479 how the former might lead to the latter and between assimilationist and subversive tendencies is one we will, 45 00:04:53,480 --> 00:04:56,930 I think, be teasing out in this evening's discussion. 46 00:04:58,130 --> 00:05:01,879 I'm sorry that Malcolm can't be with us tonight, though. 47 00:05:01,880 --> 00:05:11,030 We bring our own perspectives. We've been very much kind of thinking in dialogue with each other about all of these things. 48 00:05:12,530 --> 00:05:22,110 And he was going to show you a lot of photographs of the gay uprising, which was distributed in the men's tools of the march, 49 00:05:22,160 --> 00:05:29,840 and by being shoved surreptitiously in the kind of brochure boxes in the lobby. 50 00:05:31,070 --> 00:05:37,130 So it's cool party box if you like things and you're like Oprah, and he knows a lot more about me than I do. 51 00:05:37,580 --> 00:05:42,860 That's all I'm gonna say about it. That's enough for clearing. 52 00:05:46,320 --> 00:05:52,550 I'm afraid. I need you to help me move my slides. 53 00:06:05,430 --> 00:06:13,499 In her essay on becoming a lesbian reader, Alyson Hannigan, academic writer and former literary editor of Gay News, 54 00:06:13,500 --> 00:06:19,630 recalls a shopping trip she took aged 12 with her mother in a central London newsagents. 55 00:06:19,650 --> 00:06:27,600 She becomes convinced that a particular pulp paperback edition of a 19th century French novel is the one she must purchase. 56 00:06:28,620 --> 00:06:39,000 The cover artwork was a lurid dust of wildly inaccurate depiction of a posse featuring two women sprawled across a table and each other. 57 00:06:39,990 --> 00:06:43,740 Although author and title signified nothing to her at that time, 58 00:06:44,370 --> 00:06:53,460 she describes her confusion and bewilderment at the intensity of her feeling that the book is one of mine, the right book for me. 59 00:06:55,110 --> 00:07:04,980 Some three years earlier. In 1957, another lesbian author, Katherine Forrest, had a striking encounter with a book in a drugstore in Detroit. 60 00:07:05,850 --> 00:07:10,170 A lesbian pulp paperback appeared before her disbelieving eyes. 61 00:07:11,130 --> 00:07:15,000 I did not need to look at the title for clues, she explains. 62 00:07:15,390 --> 00:07:23,040 The cover leapt out at me from the drugstore around. The then 18 year old Forrest immediately bought the book, 63 00:07:23,040 --> 00:07:35,320 and Vernon's newly published Pulp classic Odd Girl out identifying it at first glance on basis of cover alone as a book as necessary to me as ever. 64 00:07:36,180 --> 00:07:41,400 It opened the door to my soul, she breathlessly reveals and told me who I was. 65 00:07:43,500 --> 00:07:48,060 When Nancy Gordon, author of Lesbian Coming of Age novel Annie On My Mind, 66 00:07:48,780 --> 00:07:53,730 finally found the courage to look at homosexuality in a public library card catalogue. 67 00:07:54,120 --> 00:08:02,040 No computers in those days, she explains. She did find a few adult books listed, but they were always unavailable. 68 00:08:03,450 --> 00:08:07,290 Kath Weston recalls her own raid on the college library, 69 00:08:07,710 --> 00:08:15,860 during which she uncovered a copy of the Duke's 1966 boarding School Romance tour as a is about handshaking. 70 00:08:16,320 --> 00:08:19,740 Western checked out the book with a borrowed library card, 71 00:08:20,640 --> 00:08:27,510 though it was untranslated and I knew no French Western explains the cognates were enough to make case. 72 00:08:27,630 --> 00:08:36,900 This was the book for me. Feeling oddly compelled by titles, cover copy or illustration. 73 00:08:37,650 --> 00:08:45,120 Poring over card catalogues, scrutinising author photographs, colour fonts, biographies and blurbs. 74 00:08:45,900 --> 00:08:48,720 I've sent it in print, but also in person. 75 00:08:49,230 --> 00:08:57,180 Queer readers are closet book historians for much of the last century and the early years of the present one. 76 00:08:57,790 --> 00:09:07,079 A necessarily partial subjective canon of Quidditch could only be strung together by tenacious readers willing to follow such tenuous coded threads. 77 00:09:07,080 --> 00:09:10,950 Its connection, as Philip Kennicott puts it in his essay Smuggler, 78 00:09:11,520 --> 00:09:16,920 which depends as much on material books, on their power texts as on textual content. 79 00:09:17,910 --> 00:09:25,470 Before Love, I was wondering when he writes that was the library before intimacy, before identity, before community. 80 00:09:25,740 --> 00:09:32,030 There were books. Kate Kenney has theorised this as the graphic encounter. 81 00:09:34,400 --> 00:09:41,120 But what do bibliography and book history have to say about these kinds of worldly interactions? 82 00:09:42,340 --> 00:09:47,950 Surprisingly little so far. A very brief survey of some recent work in the field. 83 00:09:48,640 --> 00:09:52,600 Queerness is conspicuous by its absence in the press and monkey libraries. 84 00:09:52,630 --> 00:09:58,300 Further reading Andrew Lynch and Alexandra Gillespie's The Unfinished Book, and in the recent collection, 85 00:09:58,300 --> 00:10:02,590 edited by Matteo Pantano and Emily, be towed teaching the history of the book. 86 00:10:04,000 --> 00:10:06,820 I value these publications enormously, 87 00:10:07,390 --> 00:10:15,820 but I am left still with questions about how the material objective the book makes a particular kind of meaning for queer people, 88 00:10:15,880 --> 00:10:19,450 which I have been looking to the broader discipline to provide answers to. 89 00:10:22,520 --> 00:10:30,200 It may not be extensively codified within traditional scholarship, but queer bibliography is nothing new. 90 00:10:31,400 --> 00:10:38,570 We've been here doing it, searching stacks, practising active until logical, ardent modes of reading, 91 00:10:38,930 --> 00:10:43,850 following archival traces, and assembling queer genealogies to sustain lives. 92 00:10:45,170 --> 00:10:48,530 The numerous approaches have aided in these quests. 93 00:10:49,630 --> 00:10:55,450 He's the third edition of Barbara Greer's collaboratively produced the Lesbian in Literature, 94 00:10:55,870 --> 00:11:04,180 published in 1991 by my art press, developed from booklets compiled from the late 1950s onwards. 95 00:11:04,690 --> 00:11:15,340 It used a coding system of letters and asterisks to indicate the quantity and quality of lesbian content within a particular work. 96 00:11:16,270 --> 00:11:25,430 I don't know if anyone here is familiar with impassioned cows by moonlight, but it is rated a star. 97 00:11:25,440 --> 00:11:35,440 So a focus on queer content, of course, also draws attention to the limits, 98 00:11:35,440 --> 00:11:43,030 even the violence of institutional archival practices and cataloguing protocols to read the well of loneliness. 99 00:11:43,030 --> 00:11:48,220 As a teenager in 1950s America, writes science fiction author Joanna Russ, 100 00:11:48,760 --> 00:11:55,390 you have to go to the locked room in the college library and explain why you wanted it a requirement. 101 00:11:55,420 --> 00:11:59,830 She points out that effectively prevented me from getting within a mile of it. 102 00:12:01,210 --> 00:12:08,260 Tiffanie, Henry, Rhonda, Katherine and Anastasia, to remind us, in the Library of Congress system until 2020, 103 00:12:08,710 --> 00:12:16,930 the classification H Ki 76 positioned homosexuality under the broader H key class sexual deviations. 104 00:12:19,510 --> 00:12:29,050 But when Philip Gaskell writes, it was the librarians who aimed to hand on texts by caring for books in their keeping and making them available. 105 00:12:29,830 --> 00:12:37,270 I think of the public librarians who facilitated access to credit, even in this country was section 28 was enforced. 106 00:12:38,230 --> 00:12:45,370 There is an oral history in the WHO Carpenter archives, in which a gay man, Tony Openshaw, 107 00:12:45,580 --> 00:12:53,020 recalls how at some point in the 1980s, after summoning the courage to request them from the reserved stock list. 108 00:12:53,620 --> 00:12:56,740 He read shelved the novels of Radcliffe, who. 109 00:12:58,200 --> 00:13:06,160 In Salford Public Library, Manchester on the open shelves, an act he refers to as liberating Rockcliffe Hall. 110 00:13:07,920 --> 00:13:16,260 I recently heard William Sherman describe the effect of the war Berg's idiosyncratic cataloguing system structured around image, word, 111 00:13:16,260 --> 00:13:25,650 orientation and action, where magic as a category but against natural science, direct you to the thing you need but don't know how to find. 112 00:13:26,460 --> 00:13:30,570 This is precisely the kind of research experience described by so many people. 113 00:13:31,230 --> 00:13:41,730 Sandy can, for example, on hearing the word lesbian for the first time as a teenager in the mid 1940s, ran to the library and the very next day. 114 00:13:43,660 --> 00:13:49,210 I looked up the word lesbian and I felt so proud of myself because it talks about the Isle of Lesbos. 115 00:13:49,510 --> 00:13:54,160 And it mentioned something about Radcliffe, who he wrote something called The Wall of Loneliness, 116 00:13:54,460 --> 00:13:58,390 which I took on that very same day and read and reread it and reread. 117 00:14:00,830 --> 00:14:09,710 A queer approach shows how bibliographic practices have already been operating both inside and outside disciplinary and institutional norms, 118 00:14:10,100 --> 00:14:15,080 bringing professionalised and more intuitive amateur methods in conjunction. 119 00:14:17,680 --> 00:14:27,760 And to those of us who came to books hungrily looking for something, especially those who like me, came also to the discipline of English literature, 120 00:14:28,180 --> 00:14:38,200 searching for an explanation of how and why the body of the book seemed to hold in its very materiality some kind of answer to unarticulated questions 121 00:14:38,200 --> 00:14:48,610 of selfhood and something weird about the position of book history and bibliographical scholarship in relation to English as it is institutionalised. 122 00:14:49,630 --> 00:14:53,410 What I mean by this is that if like me, 123 00:14:53,770 --> 00:15:02,500 you came into the Academy via a literature degree that invited you to examine the words on the page, but never the actual page. 124 00:15:05,760 --> 00:15:09,960 Book, history and bibliography feel thrillingly transgressive. 125 00:15:13,250 --> 00:15:21,860 The private investments and attachments that I like so many other career people have made in and to physical books over my lifetime, 126 00:15:22,250 --> 00:15:25,670 seem to matter to bibliographies and book historians. 127 00:15:26,030 --> 00:15:31,630 I almost can't believe it's allowed. I'm allowed to make the toxic things explicit. 128 00:15:31,640 --> 00:15:38,530 As such, it puts it, to study the book is object to think about the labour that produced it and the many harms it has passed through. 129 00:15:40,960 --> 00:15:45,850 Jesse Erickson has written that as almost always the only black person in the room, 130 00:15:46,450 --> 00:15:53,380 his initial experiences of the discursive practices of bibliographical scholarship were often characterised by isolation. 131 00:15:54,820 --> 00:15:59,979 Kate also has documented biographies, genderless aspects by implication, 132 00:15:59,980 --> 00:16:06,550 its maleness and points out bibliographies, ability to analyse and value non-canonical experiences. 133 00:16:06,560 --> 00:16:16,470 Materials has historically been limited. But when I think about books as tangible products of human endeavour in G. 134 00:16:16,480 --> 00:16:22,959 Thomas Transcendence phrase queer bibliography building on the interventions made by black and feminist 135 00:16:22,960 --> 00:16:30,100 bibliography enables me to recognise and state that endeavour includes the labour and lives of lesbian, 136 00:16:30,100 --> 00:16:32,379 gay, bisexual, transgender people, 137 00:16:32,380 --> 00:16:40,360 and always has done just as it harms women and people of colour and others who have historically been and continue to be marginalised. 138 00:16:42,360 --> 00:16:48,510 But this isn't just a matter of recovery or reparative work necessary, though that is. 139 00:16:49,230 --> 00:16:55,290 Like other liberatory bibliographies, there's something more generative and future oriented here, too. 140 00:16:55,980 --> 00:16:59,850 We're bringing the motivating currents of our work from the margins to the centre, 141 00:17:01,320 --> 00:17:07,860 and we're also pulling on the threads of traditional methods to define them and reassemble that history in new formations. 142 00:17:09,120 --> 00:17:14,970 Created geographies about recognising we embodied an effective nature of our relations with printed objects 143 00:17:15,420 --> 00:17:20,790 and how those relations add another more intangible urge to that understanding of human endeavour. 144 00:17:21,990 --> 00:17:27,180 It's about admitting to the joy we find in our work that we often don't talk about naming our 145 00:17:27,180 --> 00:17:32,410 desires for books and the frisson of pleasure we get from touching Hold it printed materials. 146 00:17:34,080 --> 00:17:39,480 Queer bibliography is about giving us the tools to explain marginalia online. 147 00:17:39,750 --> 00:17:44,129 It's found on the final page of a library. 148 00:17:44,130 --> 00:17:47,430 Copy of What else? The Wall of Loneliness. 149 00:17:48,120 --> 00:17:53,370 Not only in terms of circulation, reception and reading history, but an effective, 150 00:17:53,610 --> 00:17:59,850 sensual and haptic term to his protagonist, Stephen Gordon's famous play. 151 00:18:00,090 --> 00:18:05,069 Acknowledge us. Oh God. Before the whole world Give us also the right to. 152 00:18:05,070 --> 00:18:13,800 Our existence is annotated with a marginal asterisk and a pink post-it note schooled with an urgent declaration in black by writer. 153 00:18:15,060 --> 00:18:18,600 To my darling Lance. I exist. You exist. 154 00:18:18,910 --> 00:18:19,680 Don't forget. 155 00:18:22,830 --> 00:18:30,540 The Bookplate reveals that the copy in question was donated to Aberdeen University Library by the Gay and Lesbian Rights Campaign in 1999. 156 00:18:31,500 --> 00:18:44,040 But what else is given in this private and public kind of private in public exchange, and what might provoke in its recipient, intended or otherwise? 157 00:18:44,730 --> 00:18:52,799 To paraphrase Georgina Wilson, who chaired a panel at the symposium that Malcolm and I convened in February this year and put this 158 00:18:52,800 --> 00:18:58,980 beautifully to pay attention to material texts is also to pay attention to the bodies of their readers. 159 00:18:59,520 --> 00:19:06,390 Books act as sites that represent or remember queer encounters creating community that stretches through time. 160 00:19:08,010 --> 00:19:16,140 And all of this is backstory, if you like, to that February event which grew from a hunch and a question and a conviction, 161 00:19:16,920 --> 00:19:21,840 the hunch that there were more people out there thinking in all these lines. 162 00:19:22,560 --> 00:19:30,299 The question, where is this article scholarship and the conviction that we have a responsibility 163 00:19:30,300 --> 00:19:34,350 as historians of the book to consider the extraordinary meanings books make, 164 00:19:34,770 --> 00:19:41,219 particularly in light of increasingly intensive attacks on anti-racist scholarship and teaching trans rights, 165 00:19:41,220 --> 00:19:45,960 reproductive rights and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives of all kinds. 166 00:19:46,710 --> 00:19:51,510 The material that is currently being targeted as container and symbol of these acts and 167 00:19:51,510 --> 00:19:56,940 political commitments by progressive forces both inside and outside the university, 168 00:19:56,940 --> 00:20:03,950 school and library. In Florida, for example, school library shelves are being stripped as governor. 169 00:20:03,950 --> 00:20:11,720 Ron DeSantis demands that so-called certified media experts review books previously available to children and young people. 170 00:20:12,620 --> 00:20:21,440 According to the American Library Association, 2022 saw over 1200 documented demands to pull titles from library shows, 171 00:20:21,860 --> 00:20:30,290 nearly doubling 729 charges in 2021, which itself is an increase of over 700% from the previous year. 172 00:20:32,090 --> 00:20:38,600 The vast majority of these funds target books by and about LGBTQ people and people of colour. 173 00:20:39,860 --> 00:20:46,790 Recent reports have suggested a massive increase in the amount of stock being sent to recycling plants by libraries. 174 00:20:47,510 --> 00:20:53,270 Unable to know what to do in the face of these demands. 175 00:20:53,990 --> 00:21:02,600 Library and LGBT advocacy organisations are encouraging communities to resist book signings, and here is some guidance. 176 00:21:05,250 --> 00:21:14,700 But back to early February, we gathered 25 people in a room and twice that many over Zoom. 177 00:21:15,330 --> 00:21:25,620 I think they swapped in to these photos. We opened up the space, but the participants, James is one of them, made it what it was. 178 00:21:25,620 --> 00:21:30,870 We enthusiastically discussed everything from annotation to ornament editing to error. 179 00:21:32,250 --> 00:21:39,240 Well, it will stay with me. Most from the three days that we spent together is the sense of collective exhalation, 180 00:21:39,720 --> 00:21:44,340 the loosening of tension, no throat flaring or defensive that's necessary. 181 00:21:45,090 --> 00:21:48,270 Everybody was somehow remarkably on the same page. 182 00:21:49,060 --> 00:21:55,170 And I remember this all over again when I listened back to the roundtable session we recorded. 183 00:21:55,440 --> 00:22:01,560 There was a lot of laughter, a supportive chat, knowing wrong and relieving. 184 00:22:02,460 --> 00:22:10,470 We have plans for the next use of the event in the making and plans for publication, to which I'm happy to talk more about. 185 00:22:11,400 --> 00:22:13,290 It was an extraordinary few days. 186 00:22:13,740 --> 00:22:22,110 It's rare, I think, to have the experience not only of feeling that you are collectively shaping an emerging field of inquiry, 187 00:22:22,890 --> 00:22:26,070 but of realising, given the precarity and frankly, 188 00:22:26,070 --> 00:22:35,190 exclusion that characterises much contemporary academic existence, that this same field is the one in which you would choose to plant yourself. 189 00:22:36,180 --> 00:22:41,570 There is much to be done, not least in working to cultivate properly intersectional theocracies. 190 00:22:42,150 --> 00:22:48,000 But I look forward to seeing this empathy flourish and its contribution to the wider discipline grow. 191 00:22:48,480 --> 00:23:13,460 Thank you so much for listening. So I'm going to juggle two computers in order to read and also change slides. 192 00:23:18,400 --> 00:23:25,330 Okay. I just wanted to say at the start, thank you for inviting us to speak tonight. 193 00:23:26,170 --> 00:23:32,380 Really interesting. And I'm going to pick up on a lot of the sort of threats that Sarah threw down. 194 00:23:33,340 --> 00:23:43,360 So when we met first, when Sarah Martin and I first met to discuss what we wanted to do today, 195 00:23:43,810 --> 00:23:49,960 And one of the key questions we wanted to answer is what is clear that democracy, What does it do? 196 00:23:50,620 --> 00:23:57,040 Who does it serve? What makes it queer? And to my mind, the most pressing answer to this question is queer. 197 00:23:57,040 --> 00:24:03,630 Bibliography is an ethical imperative, an imperative that for me, revolves around community building. 198 00:24:04,960 --> 00:24:10,680 And I'm going to go in in some more depth into the attacks on sort of transpeople recently. 199 00:24:10,720 --> 00:24:13,870 So that's something that might be sensitive for you. 200 00:24:14,140 --> 00:24:20,350 Feel free to meet me for a couple of minutes. But today, since the 1st of January this year, 201 00:24:20,830 --> 00:24:29,410 556 anti-trans and more widely anti LGBTQ passed bills have been introduced in the United States legislatures. 202 00:24:30,220 --> 00:24:35,470 It has been three weeks since Florida enacted a ban on almost all trans healthcare in the state. 203 00:24:37,150 --> 00:24:45,160 In January, here in the UK, the governments at Westminster invoked Section 35 to veto Scottish reforms to the Gender Recognition Act. 204 00:24:46,060 --> 00:24:50,830 Since then, trans people have been excluded from a ban on conversion therapy. 205 00:24:51,640 --> 00:24:59,139 Changes to the 2010 Equality Act are being pursued in government, and last week a review of sex education provision was announced, 206 00:24:59,140 --> 00:25:04,920 which will likely herald a return to Section 28 or something like it to UK schools. 207 00:25:05,860 --> 00:25:15,400 In October of last year, the Home Office reported that hate crimes against trans people had risen by 56% since last year, since the year before. 208 00:25:16,090 --> 00:25:24,070 56% in a single year since the closure of the Tavistock Gender Identity Clinic. 209 00:25:24,490 --> 00:25:28,420 There is currently no provision to treat transgender children in the UK. 210 00:25:29,260 --> 00:25:36,340 And if you would be put on a waiting list at the NHS Portable Gender Identity Clinic in Sheffield today, 211 00:25:37,000 --> 00:25:42,490 at current rates, it would take over 30 years to be seen for an initial intake appointment. 212 00:25:44,900 --> 00:25:51,770 Up to 82% of transgender people experienced suicidal ideation, according to a study published last year. 213 00:25:51,800 --> 00:25:57,860 Suicide risk in transgender teens decreases by 73% with access to affirming healthcare. 214 00:25:59,080 --> 00:26:03,340 What we're experiencing even before we consider the state of public discourse, 215 00:26:03,580 --> 00:26:12,570 which is a whole other paper is in an induced crisis that is, frankly, to my mind, genocidal in intent. 216 00:26:13,770 --> 00:26:17,760 You may wonder what this has to do with the disciplinary nature of the history of the book. 217 00:26:18,180 --> 00:26:21,510 And don't worry, there is a book coming in this presentation. 218 00:26:23,660 --> 00:26:31,219 My answer to that is twofold. First, there is a strand of current discourse that rests on the premise that trans and non-binary people, 219 00:26:31,220 --> 00:26:36,290 especially trans and non-binary children and the wider queer community beyond them 220 00:26:36,620 --> 00:26:41,930 are a new or emerging and rapidly spreading phenomenon that needs to be addressed. 221 00:26:43,000 --> 00:26:52,059 This is a form of delegitimization that queer, trans and non-binary identities and the resources that support them as a novel, 222 00:26:52,060 --> 00:27:00,880 potentially fictitious and extraneous to society, and be a form of social contagion that perniciously targets young people. 223 00:27:02,250 --> 00:27:07,890 However, while it's true that notions of gender and sexuality change across cultures and over time, 224 00:27:08,190 --> 00:27:16,110 it is clear that genders and sexualities that do not align with current understandings of heterosexuality have always existed. 225 00:27:17,040 --> 00:27:25,950 Premodern, trans and queer identities are not anachronisms, even as their formations might deny easy 1 to 1 transferability. 226 00:27:27,340 --> 00:27:31,090 With that sense beyond my own intellectual curiosity, 227 00:27:31,270 --> 00:27:37,390 I see limited value in the idea of proving the existence of queer and trans histories in and of themselves. 228 00:27:37,990 --> 00:27:44,800 New and important research continues to be done in this area, and as Sara Ahmed and others have shown, 229 00:27:45,070 --> 00:27:51,190 the work of repetition and amplification is both consistent, constant and important. 230 00:27:51,760 --> 00:27:56,200 But I don't think that my reiteration of the president, the precedents, 231 00:27:56,200 --> 00:28:02,890 the trans and queer lives is likely to be the piece that convinces bad actors of the validity, 232 00:28:03,130 --> 00:28:07,120 let alone the beauty of trans, non-binary and queer existence. 233 00:28:08,190 --> 00:28:09,780 Rather than my interest in career. 234 00:28:09,780 --> 00:28:19,470 Bibliography is what it can do to build, strengthen and extend great community and through that where it can make space to create a futurity. 235 00:28:20,970 --> 00:28:27,810 One way of doing that is by historic sizing, queer and trans experience to those that feel disconnected from their histories. 236 00:28:28,710 --> 00:28:34,200 The queer bibliography provides the opportunity for more enmeshed forms of community formation, 237 00:28:34,830 --> 00:28:39,510 two interlinked aspects of which I want to think about over the next 10 minutes or so. 238 00:28:40,880 --> 00:28:49,850 The first is the importance of sustaining the career community of students and scholars working in the history of the now trans and queer people. 239 00:28:49,850 --> 00:28:55,370 A tired and they're afraid queers and trans scholars of colour, even more so. 240 00:28:56,850 --> 00:29:02,640 This is important. It is important to find ways to nourish and support one another wherever possible. 241 00:29:03,210 --> 00:29:11,010 This work and the community that we build around it is one place that resistance to pressures within and without the fields might be staged. 242 00:29:12,140 --> 00:29:16,820 However, creating opportunities to sustenance requires critical reflection. 243 00:29:17,690 --> 00:29:22,390 We do not have time to dig into the methodological structures of the bibliographical field, 244 00:29:22,700 --> 00:29:26,980 but it shouldn't be particularly controversial to suggest that scholars like Hellman, 245 00:29:27,230 --> 00:29:30,680 Elaine Tahan and Alex Gillespie have come before me, 246 00:29:31,340 --> 00:29:40,340 that many of those methods developed out of and around the European colonial project and participated in ideologies of white cultural superiority. 247 00:29:42,410 --> 00:29:51,470 It is also a field, especially in the case of premodern studies built on access, access to institutions in the buildings that we sit in today. 248 00:29:52,600 --> 00:30:00,580 Over time, such structures, disciplinary and institutional, exert their own grinding pressure on those who do not fit within their normative models, 249 00:30:01,210 --> 00:30:05,050 the pressure that rests disproportionately on trans and queens of power. 250 00:30:06,720 --> 00:30:14,190 Career bibliography I suggest we hope provides extensive, sometimes undisciplined notes critiquing, 251 00:30:14,400 --> 00:30:20,280 resisting navigating and cutting through such structures and raising up its practitioners. 252 00:30:21,320 --> 00:30:26,930 One way it does. This is through the kinship of extended trans temporal community formation. 253 00:30:27,650 --> 00:30:35,270 In other words, the queer communities we build and sustain through critically ocracy are part of an entwined part of and entwined 254 00:30:35,270 --> 00:30:43,130 with the arts that both past and present reaching through and across time through effective embodied interaction. 255 00:30:47,500 --> 00:30:51,579 The significance of effective relations in the archive is a subject that was 256 00:30:51,580 --> 00:30:56,350 heavily theorised by those working in librarianship and archival practice, 257 00:30:56,590 --> 00:31:05,950 particularly in relation to queer bodies of queer design. It is something often ignored or I would suggest pointedly avoided by book historians. 258 00:31:06,700 --> 00:31:11,110 In fact, I've been playing a game recently with my colleagues in Premodern studies. 259 00:31:11,620 --> 00:31:20,320 Sorry, anyone who's been subject to this and a question section where I asked about the impact of effective implants in their work. 260 00:31:21,490 --> 00:31:24,490 Mostly the response has been to deny that impact. 261 00:31:25,090 --> 00:31:31,090 We avoid bias, retain neutrality, separate ourselves from emotional repercussions. 262 00:31:31,570 --> 00:31:34,780 That feeling is the very heart of empiricism. 263 00:31:35,410 --> 00:31:43,840 Without experience, states Roger Bacon Defining the principles of experimental science in this Atlas mages in around 1267. 264 00:31:44,320 --> 00:31:50,650 Nothing can be sufficiently known. Knowing relies on the sensory and emotional body. 265 00:31:52,280 --> 00:32:00,890 There is a lot to look at and talk through when we bring queer and trans emotions to the archive and allowed them to guide physical bodily connection. 266 00:32:01,250 --> 00:32:10,310 And Sara has shown some of that already. And then I want to finish with what example taking might prompt for Mimi Tai when. 267 00:32:14,620 --> 00:32:18,970 So it's a big passage and there's a lot to dig into. 268 00:32:19,660 --> 00:32:30,470 And in the whole essay in which Wen discusses her move from being a queer of colour punk, speaking to our own experience of riot culture, 269 00:32:30,820 --> 00:32:37,510 Terezin creation, to the incorporation of my work in those scenes into our kind of collections. 270 00:32:38,500 --> 00:32:44,830 And it's important to acknowledge one's investment in the lives of people of colour in particular, 271 00:32:45,250 --> 00:32:50,860 and take seriously the reminder that those lives are uniquely impacted by the shootings, 272 00:32:50,860 --> 00:32:58,450 that the political and aesthetic economy renders black and brown pants sensible and traceable. 273 00:32:59,610 --> 00:33:03,389 In my own area of premodern Western European history. 274 00:33:03,390 --> 00:33:13,080 This is acutely true. And I do not want to claim her critique and over extend it beyond the bounds of its intended frame. 275 00:33:13,590 --> 00:33:17,670 It hasn't prompted her articulation, repentance and wider reflection. 276 00:33:18,870 --> 00:33:24,660 In her conception of the fractured and discontinuous history of queer of colour life, 277 00:33:25,050 --> 00:33:34,170 we might locate echoes of deep Sedgwick's conception of camp as a constellation of ephemeral threat fragments and pop objects. 278 00:33:34,950 --> 00:33:40,890 Here we see the discontinuous discontinuities of the queer icons, 279 00:33:41,580 --> 00:33:50,280 where gaps in the record and more are more present and absent, where some communities experience more absence than others. 280 00:33:51,870 --> 00:34:00,330 In her identification of queer longing for a history or record of whether or not one of us ever existed, 281 00:34:00,600 --> 00:34:04,020 she opens up the case explored elsewhere in the essay. 282 00:34:04,290 --> 00:34:10,050 The critical population is a tool for archival study, history, building and activism. 283 00:34:11,120 --> 00:34:16,460 One that you will also see echoed in the rest of my talk without space engagement. 284 00:34:17,550 --> 00:34:22,200 Quote such that the past, the disappointments can be created in the present. 285 00:34:23,910 --> 00:34:30,950 But for now, I want to dwell in just a couple of phrases the capacity for feelings, for queer things. 286 00:34:31,280 --> 00:34:34,850 In this case. Feelings of desire. Desire for more. 287 00:34:35,120 --> 00:34:44,240 More history. More people. In this case, the truth that more queer black and brown pants existed in the Riot Girl movement. 288 00:34:45,020 --> 00:34:55,720 The capacity for queer feelings to allow for the possibility of cohabitation and the potential for queer produce. 289 00:34:56,740 --> 00:35:03,160 The clear feelings to produce Chen's temple community affiliations strengthen both the 290 00:35:03,160 --> 00:35:09,530 reader in the present and the underrepresented race otherwise expunged lives of the past. 291 00:35:10,510 --> 00:35:16,960 The possibility for those people to live together. With those considerations in mind. 292 00:35:17,920 --> 00:35:25,120 My single for the day is Mass Morality for the 12th Century collection in Saints lives belonging 293 00:35:25,120 --> 00:35:30,940 to the Diocese of Shrewsbury and cared for by Ashby House and Gardens in County Durham. 294 00:35:32,610 --> 00:35:39,810 Little is known about the provenance of this manuscript, but a doctoral thesis by L.A. Lumet reveals the context. 295 00:35:40,240 --> 00:35:50,490 It is one of a large collection of 12th and 13th century books from Cistercian monasteries in France and England to be bound in a sealskin chemise. 296 00:35:51,770 --> 00:36:01,070 This fact in itself is fascinating, but there isn't time to dig into the practical theological implications of the cistercians binding choices. 297 00:36:03,290 --> 00:36:09,799 Rather, what I want to suggest is the haptic experience prompted by its sealskin chemise functions 298 00:36:09,800 --> 00:36:14,900 to activate the formation of queer and trans effective communities of care across time. 299 00:36:16,480 --> 00:36:24,580 The contents of the Darren Book exhibit, among other things, an interest in nonbinary queer and trans and gender. 300 00:36:25,590 --> 00:36:30,270 The book contains a series of hagiographic readings for the month of January, 301 00:36:30,720 --> 00:36:35,040 and together with a copy of Anselm's commentary on the following epistles. 302 00:36:36,530 --> 00:36:39,799 You can see the contents on the screen here in several areas, 303 00:36:39,800 --> 00:36:46,070 including not all early Christian martyrs of the Roman Empire known for their asceticism, 304 00:36:46,490 --> 00:36:50,810 making their presence alongside two apostate apostolic tracts. 305 00:36:50,870 --> 00:36:57,829 And. But the life of the practice for youth racing in particular has received significant 306 00:36:57,830 --> 00:37:02,510 scholarly attention for the gender transgressions and transformations that invites. 307 00:37:03,690 --> 00:37:09,330 It is one of a number of saints lives involving the miraculous, obscuring or transforming of gender. 308 00:37:09,450 --> 00:37:14,070 To avoid this heteronormative society. Societal expectations. 309 00:37:14,400 --> 00:37:18,960 If binary marriage with this imitates an exemplary life in many ODIs. 310 00:37:20,350 --> 00:37:26,470 The presence of the actors among the differently we attended matching Martins at the shoot. 311 00:37:26,630 --> 00:37:32,530 Martins The Shrewsbury connection again poses a question about the conceptual space for 312 00:37:32,550 --> 00:37:38,830 transmits within systems and communities by collating terms like models of ascetic monasticism. 313 00:37:40,250 --> 00:37:47,360 But if the contents of the volume has the question, I argued the material form of the book suggests some answers. 314 00:37:50,060 --> 00:37:58,160 The fairy seal skin binding content is like the skin which is made of the sensitive connective surface. 315 00:37:59,220 --> 00:38:08,850 It is a site of shared touch that facilitates in carrying on insurance brands the ability to make connections across time and space. 316 00:38:10,390 --> 00:38:15,530 The sensation so far beneath the fingers and it would be much softer and fuller 317 00:38:15,550 --> 00:38:21,550 800 years ago than it looks and feels today enriches the handling experience. 318 00:38:22,060 --> 00:38:26,620 The tactile stimulation, encourages interaction, is part of the reading process. 319 00:38:27,340 --> 00:38:32,980 The shared nature of these bindings across different houses also creates the community of touch. 320 00:38:33,610 --> 00:38:35,900 The 12th century monk in the life of Ireland, 321 00:38:35,920 --> 00:38:43,820 Abbey in North Yorkshire will see the same bindings and have the same tactile interactions with them as a monk in style. 322 00:38:43,960 --> 00:38:54,090 Nobody. Here, the shared sensory delights engendered engendered by the SOFA plays an active role in long distance, effective community formation. 323 00:38:56,200 --> 00:39:02,379 Marika Sippel, when discussing the experience of finding a hair stuck to a lipstick in the archive in Victoria. 324 00:39:02,380 --> 00:39:08,280 Snuggle with friends, activists and sex smoking speaks of the has the ability to, quote, 325 00:39:08,290 --> 00:39:19,720 animate the documents around it to activate supporters connection to Schneider as a person, not an archival object, discomforting as that may be. 326 00:39:21,090 --> 00:39:25,110 When I encountered the hands on the binding, the Shrewsbury had failed to see. 327 00:39:25,470 --> 00:39:32,130 The touch I share is not with the body of an individual, but with the effective touch and reading community. 328 00:39:32,400 --> 00:39:35,670 The seal skin binding was established in the warm, 329 00:39:35,670 --> 00:39:43,690 smooth leather on the spine edge of the hands that had strongly held and cared for this volume during their encounters with it. 330 00:39:44,490 --> 00:39:50,930 In stroking the remaining hand, I find it supported the intimate in body gestures of care. 331 00:39:52,170 --> 00:39:56,070 With these actions, then I am a participant in the community of camp. 332 00:39:56,150 --> 00:40:02,910 This collection of ferryboats books represents I share in this same effective communion spaces. 333 00:40:04,100 --> 00:40:10,370 So could this quick collection of Saints lives indicate a space for transness in the medieval Cistercian community? 334 00:40:11,570 --> 00:40:17,540 My giving my own fans the access to that affected community in material answers. 335 00:40:17,540 --> 00:40:27,290 In the formative, my own church insurance the trans readership to this volume and in doing so situates trans belonging within the criminal frame. 336 00:40:28,320 --> 00:40:37,390 My participation in the mechanisms of community formation through the whole thing activates the possibility and chance readings. 337 00:40:38,010 --> 00:40:44,820 My recognition of the volumes trans legibility we animates potential embodied reading experiences. 338 00:40:46,170 --> 00:40:53,160 So in the hopes of making lemonade out of lemons and to go on a bit longer than my allotted time in Malcolm's absence, 339 00:40:53,580 --> 00:41:00,090 I just wanted to reflect a bit briefly on one way to make sense of the trans temporal, 340 00:41:00,090 --> 00:41:08,520 queer and trans community that I've set up by returning to such a paranoid reading and 341 00:41:08,520 --> 00:41:13,560 reparative reading in which you reflect on the nature of time in queer relations. 342 00:41:14,070 --> 00:41:20,850 Speaking in part in the wake of the AIDS crisis, but specifically about relationships disrupted by, 343 00:41:20,850 --> 00:41:25,100 among other things, the cancer that would eventually take place. 344 00:41:26,500 --> 00:41:37,390 But also the nonlinear non-genetic lines of the descent that characterises the temporality of communities as daily routines. 345 00:41:38,530 --> 00:41:42,729 This disjuncture allows the slippage across and between generations, 346 00:41:42,730 --> 00:41:48,610 so that intimate relationality must spend time gaps that otherwise socially inaccessible. 347 00:41:49,760 --> 00:41:56,930 I suggest the relations president in the deep time with the archives, and that included among those inaccessible time. 348 00:41:58,340 --> 00:42:05,060 What difference would it make to feel the communities represented in the fragments of the queer archive with immediacy, 349 00:42:05,690 --> 00:42:11,420 with the present fullness, the coming? It may be cut off by the turn of the page. 350 00:42:12,110 --> 00:42:18,590 What happens when we allow that intimacy to seek to apprehend people and their company? 351 00:42:22,190 --> 00:42:22,420 So.