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.

Reviews

'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 Woodman's 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 Soldier's 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 Kavan's Ice - Nell Osborne
Part V: Reach
17 Gestures for feminist transmissions: Le Nemesiache's psycho-fable - Giulia Damiani
18 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 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

Editors

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.