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.

‘Deep emotion in this age is a radical act’ - Masha Tupitsyn

September reading: Masha Tuptsyn, Love Dog, 2013, published as part of the Success and Failure Series by Penny-Ante Editions.

Love Dog is the second instalment in Tupitsyn’s trilogy of immaterial writing (for the first part Tupitsyn published LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film, the first book of film criticism written entirely on Twitter). Written as a multi-media blog and inspired by Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and Mourning Diary, Love Dog re-imagines the love story in a book that is ‘part love manifesto, part philosophical notebook and part digital liturgy’.

Our readings 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. 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.