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.
"The first book devoted to the exploration of queer print cultures in Europe, illustrated throughout with unearthed material from archives and personal collections. Including manifestos, flyers, posters, zines and other forms of print media, it features interviews with those responsible for making, distributing or archiving queer print alongside theoretical essays that set particular publications and producers in context. This book examines how the production and dissemination of queer print intersected with the emergence of LGBTQ+ activism and identifies both the significant contribution that queer print has made to histories of LGBTQ+ struggle and to the history of print design"--
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.
