Laurie Toby Edison has been taking photographs for a few years for a book of photographs of male nudes entitled Familiar men. She and Debbie Notkin are now adding to the text material, which relies on having the widest variety of quotations and short commentaries on masculinity that they can find. They’re asking you to send any of these quotations and commentaries you can think of or can lay your hands on. These can be anywhere from ten words to a couple of hundred words; they can come from your own head, books, song lyrics, movies, TV commercials, or any other source you can think of. They should relate in some way to being a man in this world, directly or indirectly. Most (but not all) of them should be things men have said or written.
Topics to think about include: being a father, being a son, anger, work, money, style, expectations, sexuality, aging, power, powerlessness, class, race, privilege, humor, sports, competition, and dozens more. The more diverse in subject matter, origin, historical time period, etc., the better. They’ve already used quotations from a French soldier in 1463 and (permissions permitting) Pink Floyd, to give you an idea of the range.
If you take your quotation from a published source, please include author, title, publisher and year of publication. If you wrote it, let them know. Anonymous quotations can also be used, as long as you can assure that they aren’t in someone else’s copyright.
Everyone who sends quotations will be acknowledged in the published book.
Debbie Notkin
kith@slip.net
Laurie Toby Edison
ltedison@candydarling.com
http://www.candydarling.com/lte
http://www.candydarling.com/wel
Eastern Washington University’s Exhibit Touring Services (http://www.visual.arts.ewu.edu/ets/325check.html) has a show of Berenice Abbott’s photographs available. Lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men pictured include Princess Eugene Murat (Violette), Jean Cocteau (2), Edna St. Vincent Millay, Janet Flanner, and Flanner’s lover Solita Solano.
Call for papers for the Barnard Feminist Art and Art History Conference, October 28-29, 2000, in New York City. Submissions for papers, panels and working groups welcome from artists, professionals and students on any aspect of visual culture (painting, sculpture, prints, architecture, history, design, film, video, websites, photography, etc.) and feminism broadly defined. In addition, proposals are sought for session(s) on gender and commerce. For example, these might investigate issues such as patronage, the art market, the gendering of commercial space, consumption, prostitution, advertising, or any other issues involving commerce. Deadline for proposals 30 June 2000. Please send two copies of 1-2 page proposal and CV to: Barnard Feminist Art and Art History Conference, Dept. of Women’s Studies, 201 Barnard Hall, Barnard College, New York, NY 10027. Please contact barnardconference@hotmail.com for information only. No electronic submissions accepted.
Call for papers: “THE LIBRARY AS AN AGENCY OF CULTURE”
At the beginning of the 21st century there are more public libraries in the United States than McDonald’s restaurants. In 1998 Americans visited libraries three times as often as they attended movie theatres. That same year more children participated in summer reading programs than Little League baseball. Although scholarship on libraries has told us much about the user in the life of the library, it has told us considerably less about the library in the life of the user. How much do we really know about the place of these ubiquitous institutions in American society and culture? How should we analyze the role of libraries in the modern “information age”?
For the Summer, 2001 issue of American studies, we seek papers that analyze the American library as an agency of culture. We welcome papers that bring new methodological, theoretical, geographic, and cultural perspectives to the American library in its past and present forms, and that evaluate in new ways the cultural agencies performed by libraries in American life, including:
• concepts of the library
• libraries as contested sites for the production, storage, and dissemination of “cultural capital” (private and public libraries, archives, bookmobiles, the USIA, special collections, etc.)
• the social and psychological history of reading facilitated by libraries
• the material history of libraries (design, architecture, furniture, impact of new technology, etc.)
• the library's interface with particular communities (prisons, hospitals, churches, factories, etc.)
• the organization and sociology of knowledge (librarianship and the professions, catalog and classification systems, etc.)
• the use and appropriation of libraries by particular populations (Asian, Hispanic, African and Native Americans, children, homeless, immigrants, workers, women, gays and lesbians, etc.)
• the representation of librarians in literature, film, television, the arts, etc.
Submissions should: conform to style conventions found in American studies; not exceed 6,000 words (excluding endnotes); and be accompanied by a 100-word abstract. Authors are asked not to put their names on the manuscript. All inquires should be addressed to issue editors.
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: FEBRUARY 1, 2001.
Send ONE copy of the manuscript to EACH of the issue editors:
Wayne A. Wiegand, Professor
School of Library and Info. Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI 53706
wwiegand@facstaff.wisc.edu
Thomas August, Assistant Professor
Dept. of English, 207 Lind Hall
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455
augst002@tc.umn.edu
and TWO copies and a COMPUTER DISK COPY to:
Editors, AMERICAN STUDIES
2120 Wescoe Hall
University of Kansas
Lawrence, Kansas 66045
amerstud@ukans.edu