Gestures: A body of work is a cross-disciplinary collection of feminist approaches to gesture that considers the terms 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 books gestural structure offer a bold intervention into the conventions of critical writing. -- .
Arvustused
'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 -- .
Foreword: on gesture Anne Boyer
Introduction: writing gesture Alice Butler, Nell Osborne, and Hilary White
Part I: Scrawl
1 The intelligent hand Natalie Ferris
2 Without word without voice blind gesture Kim Dhillon
3 Language, of course, being gesture: experiments in/of the archive
Hannah Van Hove
4 Writing dreaming drawing: the ungraspable work of Renee Gladman Hilary
White
Part II: Caress
5 Perversions at her adolescent fingertips, or, Francesca Woodmans
autoerotic attentions: an essay-caress Alice Butler
6 The massage is the medium Joanna Walsh
7 Et in arcadia xerox: the work of Pati Hill Luke Roberts
Part III: Mutter
8 My chimeras Daniela Cascella
9 Speaking silence Emma Bolland
10 Mamaiaith: poetics in commotion Nia Davies
11 Cliché is the sediment of sentiment that collects in my ear Daisy
Lafarge
12 The strength of the gesture to move like a poem: Layli Long Soldiers
poetics of relationality Catherine Gander
Part IV: Scratch
13 My skin is a riot: critical and embodied writing about living in
co-occupation with a chronic health condition Maria Fusco
14 Cutting into unmarked pleasures Fatema Abdoolcarim
15 Learning from silent teachers: on researching at a teaching mortuary
Naomi Pearce
16 Returning to the scene of hurt: violent repetition and disturbance in Anna
Kavans Ice Nell Osborne
Part V: Reach
17 Gestures for feminist transmissions: Le Nemesiaches psycho-fable Giulia
Damiani
18 Between the departures and arrivals: embodied experience, photography, and
writing Azadeh Fatehrad
19 Feminisms un/common rituals: Ana Mendietas affective afterlife Hatty
Nestor
20 I want a literature that is not made from literature: on the
gesture-text of Bhanu Kapils Ban en Banlieue Joey Frances
Part VI: Dialogues on gesture
21 Flight [ Gestures] in a Galaxy of Centres: a correspondence Nisha
Ramayya and Nat Raha
22 So many social things happen with a bent head: reading, writing, scrolling
on phones, eating at tables or from laps, drawing or making with hands,
masturbating Alison Ballance, Carl Gent, and Jessa Mockridge
23 In excess of the one, two Erin Manning and Jade de Montserrat
24 Gesture, a build Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart
Afterword Kaye Mitchell
Index 322 -- .
Alice Butler is Tutor (Research) in the School of Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art. Nell Osborne is an independent scholar and artist. Hilary White is a Postdoctoral Fellow in English at Humboldt University of Berlin. -- .
