This lecture looks at some methods involved in running a feminist, queer, disabled-led publishing programme, and unpacks what it means to take pleasure seriously as a research tool. To read masturbatorily is to put the body back into spaces of knowledge production: to spread our lubed fingers over library books, and send echoes through the library shelves.

Through a partial history of feminist publishing and reading from the 20thC to today, we will think through what contributions were made to the field of erotics and feminist publishing that we can look towards in establishing masturbatory reading as a liberatory practice for marginalised communities. Moving into contemporary responses, we ask how as readers we may find escape routes and alternative sites of teaching and imagining.

When we speak about Masturbatory Reading, we look towards the teachings of Audre Lorde in thinking through the power of the erotic; the horny strategies of Kathy Acker in breaking apart texts and putting them back together; the writings of McKenzie Wark in questioning the boundaries between Body and Book, and many more. To read masturbatorily is to be a fan, to wank like an embarrassing teenager, and consider what power awaits us in the library, archive, lecture hall if we also consider what is to be gained in the bedroom, kitchen, club.

This class understands intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and ability as shifting and many-limbed components to how one moves through the world. We will come away from the session with an expanded understanding of these intersections within a creative practice, a reading practice, and how, in prioritising our pleasure, we may challenge the hierarchies of knowledge keeping and contribute to the field of erotics.

ABOUT OUR LECTURER

Sophie Paul is a designer and writer based in London. Her work intersects material feminisms, experimental essay, trashiness and the erotic. Her writing has been featured by Kunstverein München, New Contemporaries, Pilot Press, Passe Avant, and others. She has written for live voice with Repeater, Montez, and Export Radios, and in association with Pitt Rivers, Oxford. She has exhibited at MAC Birmingham, Lunchtime Gallery, and LUCKY as part of Kunstverein München’s interdisciplinary artists residency on the Ammersee. She is one half of the intra-dependant feminist press Sticky Fingers Publishing.
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