Gestures: A Body of Work is a cross-disciplinary collection of feminist approaches to gesture that bridges visual art, literature and performance. Combining creative and critical modes, it is the first feminist examination of gesture-as sign, attempt, desire-through art and writing. It collects articles, essays, and dialogues exploring how gesture/s and feminism/s animate one another in feminist and interdisciplinary practice.
Structured around specific 'gestural' stances, the book offers capacious understandings of what a gesture is and can do. It presents interdisciplinary and transnational readings of artists and writers from the 1960s onwards, including Ana Mendieta and Francesca Woodman, as well as less-recognised figures: artist-writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Portuguese visual poet Ana Hatherley, the Italian art collective Le Nemesiache and Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier. It also features experiments in art writing and autotheory that animate the ways the body acts through, or is acted upon by, gestures such as the 'cut' of khatna in female genital cutting or the 'scratch' incurred by the skin disease eczema. While gestures may fail or falter, this book argues that they hold potential for imagining worlds beyond heterosexist, patriarchal, ableist, racist and imperialist spaces of biopolitical control.