Bookish Electronic Literature: Remediating the Paper Arts through a Feminist Perspective

An exploration of bookishness (book fetishism, book porn, books as physical aesthetic objects that we adore) and in particular the way in which paper arts and bookishness, and the "cute", are used in a feminist and thereby political aesthetics.

Electronic literature is awash with paper. In particular, the paper arts of scrapbooking, paper dress-up dolls, paper-doll theater, postcards, and stitch patterns have found a resurgence in recent works of electronic literature by women writers. In very different ways but with meaningful connections, Caitlin Fisher, Travis Alber, J.R. Carpenter, and Juliet Davis all purposefully remediate these paper arts associated with female domestic crafts in ways that both archive and reinvigorate them. Moreover, as I will argue in this talk, these writers use digital poetics to reconsider these feminized forms from a feminist perspective. They insist on the significance of materiality, both the materiality of bodies of humans and of texts, in ways that subtly transform and update older feminist discourses and artistic practices for a new medium and moment.

(Source: Author's Description)