Call for Papers: The Velvet Light Trap, Issue #63, Spring 2009 Censorship and Regulation Though recent debates over YouTube and FCC regulations have brought censorship into the public light once again, these instances truly serve to underscore the manner in which our lived experience with media is in fact structured by acts of censorship and regulation. In theoretical engagements with censorship, broadly defined, media critics have increasingly abandoned romantic notions of the struggling artist and the institutional censor to embrace a more diffuse and complex understanding of power relations and production. Indeed, censorship has, and continues to function as a transfer point wherein power, politics, authorship, and reception overlap. The time has come for media studies to ask what “censorship” means in the current political and economic landscape of media production, to reinterrogate past instances of manifest censorship, to consider the productive qualities of censorship, and to uncover instances of “structural censorship” which upend the system itself. Issue #63 of The Velvet Light Trap will explore the play between expression and control that censorship engenders, and how these moments are situated within cultural and sociopolitical matrices of power. We welcome fresh perspectives on previously interrogated modes of manifest censorship, such as American cinema’s Hays Code. Special consideration, however, will be given to those pieces which explore censorship within a global context or that trouble previously held distinctions between coherent text and censor. Additionally, the editors anticipate a wide variety of theoretical approaches to the subject, be they textual analyses, institutional criticism, political economy approaches, discourse analyses, or any number of viable critical frameworks. Possible areas to explore in a broad-based definition of censorship and regulation include, but are not limited to: Institutional regulation (censorship codes or direct government intervention) Censorship as performance, spectacle, or public ritual Market censorship Film rating system and its enforcement Cutbacks in government funding for controversial art Boycotts and lawsuits “Taste” or “high/low” hierarchies as legitimation/denigration Regulation of identity and subculture through censorship Pornography and “obscenity” regulation Marginalization of artists according to race/gender/class/sexuality Technologies of censorship (V-Chip, etc…) “Unrated” and Direct-to-Video markets Marketing marginality through censorship Television ratings as a prohibiting mechanism Delegitimation as censorship “Media effects,” the vulnerable audience, and censorship Censorship and regulation of video games FCC regulation and enforcement Transnational media flow and translation/alteration/censorship Censoring as an act of (re)authorship/inscribing meaning Internet censorship and regulation (YouTube, etc…) Alternative modes of address created under censorship Rhetorical investigations of censorship debates Papers should be between 6,000 and 7,500 words (approximately 20-25 pages double-spaced), in MLA style with a cover page including the writer's name and contact information. Please send four copies of the paper (including a one-page abstract with each copy) in a format suitable to be sent to a reader anonymously. All submissions will be refereed by the journal's Editorial Advisory Board. For more information or questions, contact Andrew Scahill at [log in to unmask] Submissions are due January 30, 2008, and should be sent to: The Velvet Light Trap, c/o The Department of Radio-Television-Film, University of Texas at Austin, CMA 6.118, Mail Code A0800, Austin, TX, 78712 The Velvet Light Trap is an academic, peer-reviewed journal of film and television studies. Issues are coordinated alternately by graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Texas-Austin. The Editorial Advisory Board includes such notable scholars as Charles Acland, Peter Bloom, David Desser, David Foster, Sean Griffin, Bambi Haggins, Charlie Keil, Michele Malach, Dan Marcus, Nina Martin, Joe McElhaney, Tara McPherson, Jason Mittell, James Morrison, Steve Neale, Karla Oeler, Lisa Parks, and Malcolm Turvey. ---- To sign off Screen-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF Screen-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]