Autorentext

Alice Butler is Tutor (Research) in the School of Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art and co-editor of Gestures: A body of work.

Klappentext

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.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments vii
Prologue. Beloved, So Bittersweet xi
Introduction. A Writer’s Love 1

1. The Diary Piece: The Line, The Cut, the Blur of Two Lives, or Kathy Acker’s Bad Sex Blur 41
2. “The Novel-in-Pieces: Like Little Birds Testing Their Wings,” or Cookie Mueller’s Adolescent Reverie 83
3. The Letter Piece: Around Valentine’s Day, 1980, or Lovesick Perversions in Correspondence 139
   Postscript. Open Envelopes, or I Am Still Stung 197
   Notes 205
   Bibliography 247
   Index