An Interview with Katharine Gates | Risograph Zine
An Interview with Katharine Gates | Risograph Zine
2023 | Single-colour risograph zine
Single folded sheet with insert
Folded, single-sheet zine documenting Abigail’s September 2023 recorded conversation with Katharine Gates — former gallery curator, independent art book publisher, kink anthropologist, and author of cult classic book Deviant Desires: A Tour of the Erotic Edge.
All risograph prints are designed, printed and finished by Abigail Jacqueline Jones using her very own RZ 370 EP Riso duplicator, which was donated to her by a local independent East London bookshop — Libreria — in January 2023.
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Katharine Gates is a writer, anthropologist, publisher, artist and curator based just outside New York City. She is the author of Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex (originally published in 2000 by RE/Search Publications, and reissued by PowerHouse Books with the amended subtitle A Tour of the Erotic Edge in 2017, and was the curator of KINK: Geography of the Erotic Imagination, an exhibition hosted by the Museum of Sex, NYC, in 2006.
Katharine was the curator, owner and proprietor of Key Gallery, an independent, avant-garde contemporary art gallery in Richmond, Virginia, from 1991-93. Between 1992 and 2008, she also ran an artist’s publishing house — Gates of Heck — which would publish works by Annie Sprinkle, Charles Burns, Gary Panter, Joe Coleman and Art Spiegelman, amongst others. She is also the creator of the Kinkmap, an attempt to chart as many niche kinks and fetishes as possible, and the connections between them. The Kinkmap has been reprinted in Human Sexuality, a college psychology textbook, and can also be found online.
In this zine, which features extracts from a recorded conversation conducted with Abigail in September 2023, Katharine discusses the origins of Deviant Desires — in particular the research process that went into creating both the original 2000 edition and the book’s dramatically reworked 2017 reissue, which involved tracking down and interviewing the leading figures of several niche kink communities — and the desktop publishing phenomenon of the 1990s, which triggered the printing and dissemination of numerous niche erotic magazines proudly portraying kinks that had never previously been represented in print or the public consciousness, prompting several new divergent kink communities to coalesce into being, and providing a paper trail of uncommon erotic practices and their practitioners for Katharine to follow. Furthermore, Katharine discusses her experiences visiting and speaking at SizeCon — an annual convention for Giant(ess)/tiny and body expansion kinksters, held just outside New York City — and how her personal explorations of her own sexuality, gender presentation and neurodivergence helped inform her research practice and interest in unusual kinks.