MAP Reading Group Sick Sick Sick: The Books of Ornery Women

A reading project examining a radical or ‘bludgeoned’ subjectivity of female writers. Initiated by Emma Balkind and Laura Edbrook in association with MAP.

Our readings will contrast the work of new female writers emerging from the online Alt-Lit scene with the late nineties Semiotext(e) Native Agents publications under the editorial directorship of Chris Kraus, in addition to recuperating earlier women’s literature such as The Yellow Wallpaper, 1892, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. We seek to explore the tensions between language, sociology, subjectivity and power-relations, their impact upon gender and the ways in which they take form in the text. As readers, we have the opportunity to revive inherited post-structuralist feminist (and their questionably excessive) ideals, bringing them face to face with contemporary radical subjective writings to address how gendered language can disrupt expected hierarchical sequences or to what extent it can reproduce them.

In November we began by reading Kate Zambreno’s Heroines, 2012, alongside a screening of Věra Chytilová’s New Wave film Daisies. In February we continue our reading with Chris Kraus’ seminal confessional memoir I Love Dick, 1997, which exposes Kraus’ desire-written pursuit of theorist Dick Hebdige in collaboration with her husband Sylvère Lotringer. Chris Kraus’ Gravity & Grace, 1996, will be screened in the cinema for both reading group members and non-members. In March, for the third session, we continue to consider the semantics of the female voice and read Katherine Angel’s Unmastered: A Book On Desire, Most Difficult To Tell, 2012, and Anne Carson’s essay The Gender of Sound, 1992, and in April, the fourth session, will lead us to Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie, 2013. (May reading TBC.)

A programme of events responding to both the authors and core texts will accompany the reading group. Some will be initiated from within the project, but outside proposals are invited for reading, performance or screening events.

Contact readers@mapmagazine.co.uk for further information, to make comment, or to submit proposals.