Close Writing
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A01=Alice Butler
adolescence
AIDS
Author_Alice Butler
autofiction
bodies in pieces
caress
Carol Mavor
Category=ABA
Category=CBW
Category=JBSF
close writing
clothing archive
conceptual art
conceptual writing
correspondence
crochet glove
Dead Letter Office
diary piece
epistolary writing
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_dictionaries-language-reference
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
feminist art
interdisciplinary writing
intermedia
Jack Halberstam
Joseph Litvak
journals
Julia Kristeva
love letters
love triangle
lovesickness
pink steam
queer failure
queer feminist methodology
queer feminist writing
repair
reparative
ritual
Sappho
sex object
sex work
sick time
texture
Product details
- ISBN 9781478033240
- Weight: 445g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 21 Apr 2026
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Close Writing, Alice Butler reflects on the diaries, letters, publications, performances, lives, and afterlives of her most beloved queer feminist writers: Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller. While the transgressive avant-garde writer Kathy Acker has developed a cult following in the decades since her death in the late-90s, the actress and writer Cookie Mueller has remained relatively obscure. In this creative-critical study, Butler participates and responds to the lives and writings of her shared 'beloved’, reimagining the scene of the archive as a scene of triangulated and bittersweet love that traverses the boundaries of life and death. She draws on the autofictional strategies that Acker and Mueller pioneered in their own experimental writings and performances, encountering the women in intimate theoretical spaces of sensuality, sexuality, and sickness that slip between life and text. By encountering Acker and Mueller as transgressors and innovators, but also as beloved figures in her writing life whom she addresses in love letters, Butler brings readers to new, reparative textures of understanding, embodiment, and affection through close writing.
Alice Butler is Tutor (Research) in the School of Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art and co-editor of Gestures: A body of work.
