Books

In Close Writing, Alice Butler reflects on the diaries, letters, publications, performances, lives, and afterlives of her most beloved queer feminist writers: Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller. While the transgressive avant-garde writer Kathy Acker has developed a cult following in the decades since her death in the late-90s, the actress and writer Cookie Mueller has remained relatively obscure. In this creative-critical study, Butler participates and responds to the lives and writings of her shared “beloved,” reimagining the scene of the archive as a scene of triangulated and bittersweet love that traverses the boundaries of life and death. She draws on the autofictional strategies that Acker and Mueller pioneered in their own experimental writings and performances, encountering the women in intimate theoretical spaces of sensuality, sexuality, and sickness that slip between life and text. By encountering Acker and Mueller as transgressors and innovators, but also as beloved figures in her writing life whom she addresses in love letters, Butler brings readers to new, reparative textures of understanding, embodiment, and affection through close writing.

“Close Writing is a book as much about Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller as it is about the process of writing towards them. This allows a self-reflexive, painfully close analysis of what it is to pursue the objects of one’s critical affection, fanaticism, or love. Alice Butler is an excellent, compelling, and challenging writer. There’s magic here, in the precision and clarity, and in the imaginative entrance into her subjects’ writings and lives.” — Dominic Johnson, Professor of Performance and Visual Culture, Queen Mary University of London

“Close Writing is a unique feminist experiment in critical and creative art writing. Combining theoretical insights, deep archival research, and close visual as well as textual analysis, Butler enacts the intimate, performative practice of ‘close writing’ through the traces Acker and Mueller left behind—texts, garments, photographs. This book reimagines reading and writing as acts of affection, resistance, love and proximity across time, loss, love, and feminist desire.” — Jo Applin, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of the History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London

Gestures: A body of work is a cross-disciplinary collection of feminist approaches to ‘gesture’ that considers the term’s complex registers across embodied, aesthetic and political scenes. Attending to gestural movements, languages, feelings and communications, the book argues that gestures can unsettle gendered, sexed and racialised relations, norms and affects. Contributors activate the lens of gesture to offer innovative readings of art and literary works from the 1960s onwards and in transnational contexts. Experiments in art writing and autotheory reflect on the entanglement of the body, gesture and feminist practice. The book proposes that gesture be rethought as a mode of feminist practice that includes art, writing, performance and theory. Mixing disciplines, forms, genres and voices, these contributions and the book’s gestural structure offer a bold intervention into the conventions of critical writing.

“This landmark anthology proposes genre as a mode of somatic thought. In a succession of essays focused on inter-genre forms, Gestures generates a brilliant new context in which to think with experimental practice as an emergence “through relations, bodies, processes” that is necessarily and gorgeously communal, on-going and incomplete.” — Bhanu Kapil

“This is a phenomenal body of feminist work and workings. It brings together an awesome assembly of writers and artists on the micro and macro issues of textual practices, cross-mapping histories of mark-making, breathtaking and being. Reading this anthology is to join a diverse field of study, to move within the potentialities of practice, and where we are, if I may, not waving but drawing, or, not only waving but also drawing, as well as thinking and drawing together other thinking on our redrawing.” — Holly Pester