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VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20261023T135722Z
DTSTART:20261110T183000Z
DTEND:20261110T200000Z
SUMMARY:Close Writing: Alice Butler in conversation
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DESCRIPTION:Explore the lives of queer feminist writers Kathy Acker and C
 ookie Mueller with Alice Butler and Rebecca Hurst.\n\nWe are delighted t
 o welcome Alice Butler to Blackwell's in partnership with the University
  of Manchester's Centre for New Writing. Alice will be discussing Close 
 Writing: Kathy Acker\, Cookie Mueller & Love-in-Pieces with Rebecca Hurs
 t.\n\nAbout the book:\n\nIn Close Writing\, Alice Butler reflects on the
  diaries\, letters\, publications\, performances\, lives\, and afterlive
 s of her most beloved queer feminist writers: Kathy Acker and Cookie Mue
 ller.\n\nWhile the transgressive avant-garde writer Kathy Acker has deve
 loped a cult following in the decades since her death in the late-90s\, 
 the actress and writer Cookie Mueller has remained relatively obscure. I
 n this creative-critical study\, Butler participates and responds to the
  lives and writings of her shared 'beloved'\, reimagining the scene of t
 he archive as a scene of triangulated and bittersweet love that traverse
 s the boundaries of life and death. She draws on the autofictional strat
 egies that Acker and Mueller pioneered in their own experimental writing
 s and performances\, encountering the women in intimate theoretical spac
 es of sensuality\, sexuality\, and sickness that slip between life and t
 ext.\n\nBy encountering Acker and Mueller as transgressors and innovator
 s\, but also as beloved figures in her writing life whom she addresses i
 n love letters\, Butler brings readers to new\, reparative textures of u
 nderstanding\, embodiment\, and affection through close writing.\n\nAbou
 t the author:\n\nAlice Butler is an art writer and interdisciplinary sch
 olar who specialises in the intersections of recent and contemporary fem
 inist and queer art\, writing\, and theoretical practices. Her creative 
 and critical (often cross-genre/cross-historical) work activates reparat
 ive forms of correspondence to get closer to embodied states\, encounter
 s\, and scenes of writing\, desire\, sickness\, and love. She regularly 
 publishes her work across scholarly and creative outputs and contexts\, 
 with recent epistolary-themed essays appearing in Bricks from the Kiln (
 an issue on letters)\, Correspondences de Appel 1975–2025\, and Lifebloo
 d: Munch and the Medicalization of Modern Life. Articles on the lives an
 d works of women artists such as Nan Goldin\, Cookie Mueller\, and Kathy
  Acker have also appeared (or are soon due to appear) in anthologies on 
 women’s fashion photography\, art and the critical medical humanities\, 
 and the autobiographical impulse in contemporary art\, respectively. Ali
 ce is co-editor of Gestures: A body of work (Manchester University Press
 \, 2025)\, which includes her article on Francesca Woodman’s ‘autoerotic
  attentions’. Her scholarly monograph Close Writing: Kathy Acker\, Cooki
 e Mueller\, and Love-in-pieces is forthcoming with Duke University Press
  in April 2026. She is currently at work on a new book that explores the
  lives and afterlives of stockings and pantyhose in 1970s–80s feminist a
 rt practices.\n
STATUS:TENTATIVE
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
CLASS:PUBLIC
LOCATION:Blackwell's Manchester\, University Green\, 146 Oxford Road\, Ma
 nchester\, M13 9GP
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