Gestures

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.

'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 BoyerIntroduction: writing gesture – Alice Butler, Nell Osborne, and Hilary White Part I: Scrawl1 The intelligent hand – Natalie Ferris2 Without word without voice blind gesture – Kim Dhillon 3 ‘Language, of course, being gesture’: experiments in/of the archive – Hannah Van Hove4 Writing dreaming drawing: the ungraspable work of Renee Gladman – Hilary WhitePart II: Caress5 Perversions at her adolescent fingertips, or, Francesca Woodman’s autoerotic attentions: an essay-caress – Alice Butler6 The massage is the medium – Joanna Walsh7 Et in arcadia xerox: the work of Pati Hill – Luke Roberts Part III: Mutter8 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 Lafarge12 ‘The strength of the gesture to move like a poem’: Layli Long Soldier’s poetics of relationality – Catherine GanderPart IV: Scratch13 My skin is a riot: critical and embodied writing about living in co-occupation with a chronic health condition – Maria Fusco14 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 Kavan’s Ice – Nell Osborne Part V: Reach17 Gestures for feminist transmissions: Le Nemesiache’s psycho-fable – Giulia Damiani18 Between the departures and arrivals: embodied experience, photography, and writing – Azadeh Fatehrad 19 Feminism’s un/common rituals: Ana Mendieta’s affective afterlife – Hatty Nestor 20 ‘I want a literature that is not made from literature’: on the gesture-text of Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue – Joey Frances Part VI: Dialogues on gesture21 ‘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