Gestures - by Alice Butler & Nell Osborne & Hilary White (Paperback)

About the Book

This cross-disciplinary collection of feminist approaches to gesture offers new explorations of how gesture/s and feminism/s have animated one another in feminist and interdisciplinary artistic practice from the 1960s onwards.

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

Gestures: A Body of Work is a cross-disciplinary collection of feminist approaches to gesture that bridges visual art, literature and performance. Combining creative and critical modes, it is the first feminist examination of gesture--as sign, attempt, desire--through art and writing. It collects articles, essays, and dialogues exploring how gesture/s and feminism/s animate one another in feminist and interdisciplinary practice.
Structured around specific 'gestural' stances, the book offers capacious understandings of what a gesture is and can do. It presents interdisciplinary and transnational readings of artists and writers from the 1960s onwards, including Ana Mendieta and Francesca Woodman, as well as less-recognised figures: artist-writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Portuguese visual poet Ana Hatherley, the Italian art collective Le Nemesiache and Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier. It also features experiments in art writing and autotheory that animate the ways the body acts through, or is acted upon by, gestures such as the 'cut' of khatna in female genital cutting or the 'scratch' incurred by the skin disease eczema. While gestures may fail or falter, this book argues that they hold potential for imagining worlds beyond heterosexist, patriarchal, ableist, racist and imperialist spaces of biopolitical control.

Review Quotes

'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

About the Author

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 an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University.