Reuses of the Erotica: A Sympodium on and Beyond Queer Collage

Admission is free.

Find location and parking information for this symposium below.

“Reuses of the Erotic” is organized in conjunction with the exhibition Cock, Papers, Scissors, which brings together works by an intergenerational group of fifteen queer artists who explore the collaged page or the scrapbook with diverse, erotically inclined tactics. The exhibition draws from both archival collections and contemporary practices, focusing on how these artists print culture for worldmaking projects ranging from the era of gay liberation to the present. This symposium seeks to open up new conversations beyond works in the exhibition to capaciously explore their core materials and practices: queer and feminist pornography, collecting, and collaging.

Schedule

Coffee, 10:30am

Porn Hoarders, 11am
A scholarly panel on collecting and exhibiting queer erotic material featuring:

Jennifer Tyburczy (UC Santa Barbara, author of Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display), “Queer Curatorship”

Scott Herring (Indiana University, author of The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture), “Queer Modernist Collecting, ca. 1968”

Nguyen Tan Hoang (Bryn Mawr College, author of A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation), “Sad Porn”

Juana María Rodríguez (UC Berkeley, author of Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings), “Coloring Cunts and Other Ways to Tell Stories”

Session for Cutting Up Men, 2pm 
A hands-on queer porn collage workshop with artist Suzanne Wright

Keynote, 4pm
Susie Bright, “Dyke Forensics: The On Our Backs Archive and the Lesbian Erotic Turning Point”

Susie Bright is the co-founder of On Our Backs, the first (and last) lesbian sex magazine; the editor of Herotica, the first women’s erotic short fiction collections; and the first female film critic in the X-Rated Critics Organization Hall of Fame. She created the first university seminar on the study of sexual representation and pornography in 1986. Both her career archives and the On Our Backs archives were recently donated to the Human Sexuality Archive at Cornell. She is an expert journalist, SCOTUS plaintiff, and activist/archivist on the history of the pornography, censorship, and erotic cinema from a feminist perspective. Her books include The Sexual State of the Union, Big Sex Little Death, and the The Best American Erotica. She is one of the first writer/activists referred to as a sex-positive feminist.

Inquires regarding “Reuses of the Erotic” can be directed to Lucas Hilderbrand at lucas.h@uci.edu.

Generous support for this symposium is provided by the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) President’s Public Partnership in the Humanities grant. This event is co-sponsored by the Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies and the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at UC Irvine, and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.

Location

The Humanities Gateway is located in the Humanities Plaza on the corner of West Peltason and Mesa Road with its main entrance facing the campus pedestrian ring mall. You can download a PDF of the UCI campus map, or launch the Interactive Campus Map, type in “Humanities Gateway” into the “Search” field, and click on the appropriate link.

The closest parking is the Mesa Parking Structure, “MPS” on the campus map. Parking is $8/day for general and $13/day for reserved slots.

Image: (Top) Suzanne Wright, Missing Men, 2014. Photo collage, 14 x 21.75 inches. Courtesy of the artist