Blackshaw & Butler perform epistolary exchanges across time to theorise letter writing as feminist care, enveloping sickness into love.
Alice Butler
Alice Butler is an interdisciplinary writer and scholar based in the School of Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art who specialises in the intersections of recent and contemporary feminist and queer art, writing, and theoretical practices. Her creative and critical (often cross-genre/cross-historical) work activates reparative forms of correspondence to get closer to embodied states, encounters, and scenes of writing, desire, sickness, and love. This is central to recent projects, which include the article ‘Fan Letters of Love’ (Fandom as Methodology: A Sourcebook for Artists and Writers, 2019), the article ‘“Have you tried it with three? Have you?” Ann Quin, Love Triangles, and the Affects of Art/Writing,” in Capacious: A Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry (2021), essays in art writing anthologies ON CARE (2020) and ON FIGURE/S (2021), and a collaborative letter writing performance/publication project on/with the sick women of art history (with Gemma Blackshaw, 2020-ongoing). She is currently finalising two books: a monograph on the sick pleasures and epistolary desires of Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller’s autofictional archives and an edited collection on gesture in interdisciplinary feminist practice (both forthcoming). She is also at work on a new book that explores the minor intimacies of found materials in feminist art and writing practices, with an essay drawn from this research recently appearing in Map Magazine (‘Too Likeable (To the Side of Rosemary Mayer)’, 2022).
WHO SUPPORTS US
The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.
However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:
Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers
Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey