Please join us on Zoom for our first event of the Spring 2021 semester as we host a discussion of Joan Lubin’s work-in-progress, “Novel Cops,” on Friday, February 12th, at 10:00 am CST. To confirm attendance and receive the pre-circulated paper we’ll be discussing, please write to Mel Micir (mmicir@wustl.edu).

Abstract: “Novel Cops” is a methodological meditation on the media regulatory systems relating the novel and the police in midcentury America. Taking my cues from Pat Parker’s poem from the early 1970s -- “In English Lit., they told me / Kafka was good / because he created / the best nightmares ever -- / I think I should / go find that professor / & ask why / we didn’t study / the S.F. Police Dept” -- this article-in-progress asks what our reading practices might look like if, instead of following D.A. Miller into the realm of discursive disciplinary power, we set out to study the nightmarish creativity of the local police forces whose ambivalent relation to their own social status impinged on literary production and reception materially, conceptually, and consequentially in historically and regionally specific ways. Parker’s poem suggestively avers that literary value discourse (appraisals of “good” authors, or “the best nightmares ever”) can confound our capacities to locate or reconcile the force of the cops in the making of the canon and its study. I turn to the SFPD’s late-1950s crusade against the Beat poets of North Beach, and to one of its particularly telling battlegrounds: the pornographic novel Sex Life of a Cop (Saber Press, 1958). Sex Life of a Cop is an illustrative case study notable for both its representation/thematization of the cops and for its active policing by the cops, the postal service, and ultimately the courts, over the course of a decade of pivotal transformations in obscenity law. While the novel represents exclusively heterosexual sex and is clearly intended for a straight audience, it was published and distributed by homophile organizers in the Mattachine Society, revealing a tangled web of identitarian displacements and connected histories illuminated by the midcentury media systems that both facilitated and regulated the dissemination of subcultural, countercultural, and revolutionary discourses.

Bio: Joan Lubin is a visiting scholar at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. She received her PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania, and previously was Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Science & Literature at Cornell, and John Money Fellow for Scholars of Sexology at the Kinsey Institute. She is completing a book project, "Pulp Sexology," about the imprint of quantitative sexology on postwar literature and culture, and starting another, "Social Science Fictions," about the construction of science fiction as an object of literary critical attention and feature of English department curricula. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in Post45, Women & Performance, New Literary History, and First Mondays. She is the editor of a special issue of Social Text, "Sexology and Its Afterlives," forthcoming this September.