Catrin Morgan
Parsons School of Design
Satan was a Lesbian: Pulp fiction covers in the Lesbian Herstory Archive
Panel: Archives
This paper will be a survey of the covers of lesbian pulp fiction held by the Lesbian Herstory Archive in New York. The collection contains books from the 1930s to today and the focus of this research will be the decade preceding the Stonewall uprising in 1969. The archive refers to these books as ‘survival literature’; pulp fiction was one of the only places in popular culture where lesbians could see themselves depicted. It seems that many of the cover illustrations were created by straight, male illustrators who most likely imagined a straight, male audience. The covers offer a femme on femme aesthetic (embedded with disapproving moral signifiers) that was both produced and then erased by the male gaze. The paper will consider the heightened, fictional world proposed by these covers as one made possible by the unique conditions of publishing in the USA in the 1950s and 60s. The women are depicted in moments of high drama; on the tipping point of seduction or ‘rescue’. The covers capture their heroines outside of time, and/or the death and destruction that inevitably awaited them. The paper will consider the ways that these images found a female audience who read them against the intent of the illustrators who made them and the role that these images now play in contemporary queer culture. There is a pleasurable (queer) subversion in enjoying images that offer problematic or exploitative depictions of lesbian relationships and this ‘looking against’ may offer alternative ways to consider notions of heritage (and who inherits from whom). To paraphrase Jack Halberstam, to be queer is often to operate outside of notions of family which rest on inheritance or ’transfer’. What do these covers mean as a contemporary lesbian inheritance and how have they influenced subsequent depictions of queer women?
Catrin Morgan is Assistant Professor in Illustration at Parsons School of Design and a 2022-23 GIDEST Faculty Fellow. She is an illustrator, artist, and designer whose practice is concerned with mathematical, architectural, and theoretical systems. Catrin has an MA in Communication Art and Design from The Royal College of Art in London and a PhD in Visual Communication also from the RCA. Her first book, Phantom Settlements (Ditto Press, 2011), an illustrated exploration of the work of Ryan Gander, Jamie Shovlin, and Tom McCarthy, was produced in collaboration with Mireille Fauchon and the design studio Julia. Her second book, an illustrated edition of Ben Marcus’s landmark of experimental fiction, The Age of Wire and String, was published by Granta Books in 2013. In 2017 she was invited to produce a limited edition artist’s book, Studies for Studies, at Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale in New York and, in 2018, Jerome’s Study, a further collaboration with Max Porter, was published by Test Center Books in London.