Sick Sick Sick: The Books of Ornery Women Reading Group & Film Screening

Every six to eight weeks, MAP will hold a reading group as part of a project that examines the radical or ‘bludgeoned’ subjectivity of female writers. Initiated by Emma Balkind and Laura Edbrook, the project will be accompanied by a programme of events responding to both authors and core texts.

The 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, in addition to recuperating earlier women's literature. They seek to explore tensions between language, sociology, subjectivity and power-relations, their impact upon gender and the ways in which they take form in the text.

Interested in suggesting something for a reading, performance or screening? Proposals of up to 500 words (rolling deadline) are welcome; contact readers@mapmagazine.co.uk to submit these or for further information.

6pm - 7pm: Introductory meeting (reading group only)
This event will look at Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (2012). A limited number of books will be supplied free of charge with the generous and kind support of MIT Press.

‘It must be illness, this violence. No other way to explain losing one's shit.’

Zambreno's defiant confessional novel collages literary criticism and autobiography to parade issues of excess and deal with the position of the female writer in relation to her male counterpart, often her husband. She surveys the medicalisation and institutionalisation of the 'mad wives of modernism': Zelda Fitzgerald, Simone Weil, Frances Farmer and others, and reflects on her own choices and personal marginalisation as someone who is a wife (vs. someone who is 'wifed') and a writer.

MAP are very pleased to announce that Kate Zambreno will be reading a selected passage from her book on mapmagazine.co.uk. This will be available online from Thu 14 November.

7.30pm: Screening of Daisies (Sedmikrásky), open to all
directed by Vera Chytilová, 1966, 76mins, distributed in the UK by Second Run

Czech surrealist slapstick film Daisies follows two young women, Marie I and Marie II, in their carnivalesque disruption of the hierarchical systems that organise their world. Their out-of-the-norm ('deranged') behaviour exhibits women as messy and chaotic as they joyfully devour and revolt against silence, submission and feminine delicacy. Experimentally filmed and released during the Cold War, the film was labelled as 'depicting the wanton' by Czech authorities and banned. Chytilová was subsequently silenced and forbidden to work in Czechoslovakia until 1975. The film was re-released in 2009. Presented with the kind permission of Second Run, this will be the first screening of Daisies in Scotland, distributed by Second Run.