LONDON CONFERENCE IN CRITICAL THOUGHT 2025
Birkbeck, University of London
20th-21st June 2025
Deadline for Proposals: Friday 4th April 2025
The Call for Presentations is now open for the 12th annual London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT), which will be hosted and supported by Birkbeck, University of London on 20th-21st June, 2025.
The LCCT is an annual interdisciplinary conference that provides a forum for emergent critical scholarship, broadly construed. The event is always free for all to attend and follows a non-hierarchical model that seeks to foster opportunities for intellectual critical exchanges where all are treated equally regardless of affiliation or seniority. There are no plenaries, and the conference is envisaged as a space for those who share intellectual approaches and interests but who may find themselves at the margins of their academic department or discipline.
There is no pre-determined theme for each iteration of the conference. Each year the conference’s intellectual content and thematic foci are determined by the streams that are accepted for inclusion in response to the Call for Stream Proposals (now closed).
Masturbatory Reading
Stream Organisers: Sticky Fingers Publishing
This stream explores the liberatory erotics of feminist, queer, disabled and indigenous approaches to interdisciplinary research, forgrounding materialist and embodied processes of knowledge making.
We take this name from Kate Zambreno’s book Heroines, in which she writes “I wake up and read even though Nietzsche says that's foolish. A sort of narcotic reading, I read with my hands down the front of my pants – my mode of reading is masturbatory.” We expand outward from here with the help of Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic, “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings… having experienced the fullness of depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect, we can require no less of ourselves.” Masturbatory reading asks what power and pleasure can be accessed through attending to the erotics of knowledge production; how sites, systems and tools of knowledge making reiterate violent norms (and in turn, erase devient practices); and what the making (and unmaking) of these systems could allow us to imagine.
This stream proposal builds on our 2023 anthology Masturbatory Reader, which through 16 contributions of experimental non-fiction began to scope out this field. Building on this here we want to investigate further erotic research methodologies, as they are entangled with the architectures of public sex and private property, sovereignty and land, and subcultural media and practices. The body and book are both distributary frameworks, and what we are interested in here is how masturbatory reading enables us to access erotic architectures of knowledge.
Mark Rifkin’s essay ‘The Erotics of Sovreignty’, charactirises “the reciprocity of place. The land is both desired and desiring, is not that thing that can be priced and traded, is a feeling entity.” This also calls to mind Lyónn Wolf’s performance text ‘Sex in Public’: “Practical homonormativity and well-cared-for economic brick walls rewrite the meanings of vulnerability and receptivity and the whole field of sexual and social relations becomes a privatised ethics of fiscal ties.” Mass-media becomes a metaphor for how we understand gender technologies and the gendered body. Or, as Paul B. Preciado writes in Testo Junkie: “the body is no longer just a means of transmission, distribution, and collection of information, but the material effect of those semiotechnical exchanges.”
Themes might explore:- Sexually transgressive interventions in traditional sites of knowledge production such as the library, archive or university;
- The speculative erotics of historical research;
- Performing power, pain and pleasure through theory;
- The interactions between public sex and private property;
- The sexual agency of land;
- Subcultural erotic media and practices;
- Mass media as a metaphor for how we think of our bodies, or, the body as semiotechnically determined.
We would be interested in opening this call for contributions out to interdisciplinary formats: including film, performance, and experimental texts, as well as academic presentations, and workshops.
If you would like to participate, please send an abstract for a proposed presentation with the relevant stream title indicated in the subject line to hello@londoncritical.co.uk.
Abstracts should be submitted as Word documents of no more than 250 words and must be received by Friday 4th April 2025.
Please note that LCCT is an in-person conference.