Queer Print in Europe

Description

How have radical print cultures fostered and preserved queer lived experience from the 1960s to the present? What alternative stories about queer life across Europe can visual material reveal? Queer Print in Europe is the first book devoted to the exploration of queer print cultures in Europe, following the birth of an international gay rights movement in the late 1960s. By unearthing these ephemeral paper documents from archives and personal collections, including materials that have been out of circulation since they were first distributed, this book examines how the production and dissemination of queer print intersected with the emergence of LGBTQ+ activism within specific national contexts. This vital contribution to queer history explores borders and political movements, and the ways in which these materials contributed, through their international circulation, to the creation of a 'post-national' queer community. Illustrated throughout with examples of manifestos, flyers, posters, zines and other forms of print media, it features interviews with those responsible for making, distributing or archiving queer print, alongside a series of new theoretical essays that set particular publications and the individuals and groups that produced them in context. The book isolates specific instances of queer print media and scrutinises their design aesthetics, identifying both the significant contribution that queer print has made to histories of LGBTQ+ struggle and to the history of print design.

Glyn Davis is Professor of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, UK. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of eleven books, including The Richard Dyer Reader (BFI/Bloomsbury, co-edited with Jaap Kooijman, forthcoming 2022), The Living End: A Queer Film Classic (forthcoming, 2022), and Pop Cinema (co-edited with Tom Day, forthcoming 2022). From 2016 to 2019, Glyn was the Project Leader of 'Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures', a pan-European queer history project funded by HERA and the European Commission (www.crusev.ed.ac.uk). Laura Guy is Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at The Glasgow School of Art, UK. Her research focuses on post-1960s photographic, documentary and print cultures and has recently been published in Third Text, Women: A Cultural Review, Aperture and Frieze. She is editor of Phyllis Christopher, Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Protest, 1988-2003 (2021).

Queer Print in Europe presents a timely and necessary analysis of queer printmaking, zines and print culture. It is unique in its use of interviews, its wide-ranging historical and political analysis and its challenge to a rights-based historical teleology common in North American analyses of LGBTQ+ cultural phenomenon. -- Alexandra Gonzenbach Perkins, Texas State University, USA This book represents a vital contribution to the fields of queer history and queer print cultures. It starts from the insistence that queer community relies on the networked circulation of objects, information and ideas. From there, the various chapters explore a range of publications, each exploring how the circulation of printed material since the 1970s has shaped European LGBTQ activism. The collection offers a rich history of European queer print cultures and provides methodologies for future research in the field. -- Sam McBean, Queen Mary University of London, UK Davis and Guy provide a well-organized and thoughtfully selected collection of essays that represent an exciting broadening of the field of queer print culture from its often US-centered perspective. Exploring themes of inclusion/exclusion, connection/debate, past/present, this book offers both scholars and those interested in queer culture an enticing entry into queer worldmaking. In bringing different voices together and exploring a variety of publications, Queer Print in Europe does exactly what these circulated objects did-foster connection and invite further collaboration. -- Alexis Bard Johnson, Curator at ONE Archives, University of Southern California, USA