‘To write “with” gesture is to write in-between; it is to inhabit the flux of the gendered body, opening up new spaces for feminist art, writing, performance, and theory’ – so claim the editors of this volume in their introduction. This in-between writing, this writing with/as gesture is – as the preceding chapters evince – writing that in its oscillations resists the monologic, the dogmatic, the disciplinary (it is beyond the inter-disciplinary, it destroys disciplines, means that they cannot remain intact); it is a writing that resists the colonising, the brutal, the brutalising, the divisive. It is a layering of voices that speaks to and of and from identities and places and positions that are also between (positions that find, yet, a kind of strength in their vulnerability). It is verbal and visual, often simultaneously. It is collaborative (sometimes collective, joyful; sometimes not). It is parenthetical (yet assertive, insistent, sly). It is generative, yet knows its own insufficiency. It is poetic, yet sometimes ugly (defiantly so).

As an embodied writing, this writing-as-gesture is an invitation to the haptic – to touch and connection, to an epistemology of physical enactment and inhabitation. I am struck by the recurrence of hands, real or imagined, present or implied, in these chapters: the manicule in medieval manuscripts (the ‘intelligent hand’) (Ferris); the ‘caress’ both performed and invited by Francesca Woodman’s photographs (Butler); the archival encounter that promises touch (but sometimes insists on gloves) (Van Hove); the domestic objects presenting themselves for handling in Pati Hill’s experiments with the copier (Roberts); the hands kneading slime in ASMR videos (Walsh); even the ‘ungraspable’ work of Renee Gladman, which itself frequently invokes the hand that draws and writes (White). For Nia Davies this is a ‘life of repetitious grasping’, but grasping doesn’t necessarily lead to ‘possession’ or mastery. This writing-as-gesture compels us to conceptualise the materiality of the text in new ways, and to find new – embodied, provisional, collaborative, precarious – ways of learning and knowing.

These are writings, gestures, performances, and interventions that also ask us to reflect on the deployment of voice and voices, and on the blurring of boundaries between written language and spoken. We talk (without acknowledging the metaphoricity of such phrases) of “voice” in literature and of texts that “speak” to us, but the chapters in Gestures hint at how voice physicalises text, how it breaks down those barriers between inside and outside, how its vibrations carry from body to body. The forms of speech here fracture into muttering, which, write the editors, ‘strays from accepted forms of linguistic sense-making’ (Introduction); conversations become vibrantly visual on handwritten, decorated, and drawn pages, or connect through folded ‘mermaid’ drawings; grammar breaks down into sounds, echoes, grunts; syllables scatter across the page; dialogues reveal the porosity of speakers and persons, ethically insisting on our ineluctable relationality.

I keep coming back to the body here, as do the contributors to Gestures, and “the body” in these interventions encompasses many different things: physical performances and rituals; embodied research (the researcher’s body in the archive, or the letters, documents, and ephemera that constitute the material traces of lives, histories, correspondences); the cut (but not ‘mutilated’) body subjected to practices of female genital cutting. Representations of imperilled bodies abound: Anna Kavan’s aesthetically tortured bodies; the black (brown) body of Ban in Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue, supine in protest; the absent body of Ana Mendieta invoked by activists seeking to right the wrongs committed against her; the eczema-struck body that itches and burns, inviting scratching (but many chapters here scratch an itch of some kind). ‘How do you bring the body to the page?’, asks Kim Dhillon, in this case the raped and murdered body of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, though we might also ask: how do you not? The text itself is also a body here, even if an ‘exquisite corpse’ (as Ballance, Gent, and Mockridge gleefully name their collaboration). Gestures are not always/only physical, but collectively these chapters refuse to leave out the body, instead allowing its insistence to constitute a critique of supposedly superior (rational, cerebral) modes of enquiry and engagement. As an avowedly feminist anthology, it is perhaps unsurprising that Gestures keeps harping on bodies – ‘to harp on’ something is generally denigratory, but I like its implications of persistence and musicality (noise, dissonance), the way it brings us back to decidedly gendered ideas of nagging and wittering (both intensely physical vocalisations). “The body” recurs, returns, nags at us, time and time again, in feminist writing from de Beauvoir to Irigaray to Butler to Bordo to Grosz to Alaimo and Hekman to Fisher and Dolezal, and beyond.¹ The contributors to Gestures are part of this trajectory (let’s not call it a “tradition”), and if the body is, for many of them, a fraught matter (literally overloaded) then they are content to sit with that weight.

Writing with/as gesture is also, notably, a writing of/with/through feeling: steeped in feeling, redolent, sometimes gagging on it. It is writing that moves (in reading these chapters and interventions I have been moved, have faltered, have hidden this). This makes me both want and not want to claim it as feminist practice. In The Pink Guitar – subtitled ‘writing as feminist practice’ – Rachel Blau DuPlessis teases us with what appear to be staccato excerpts from her own work’s reception:

The writings collected here test the meanings, limits, and possibilities of these hitherto derogated realms of the ‘confessional’, inauthentic, intoxicated, ‘garish’, and ‘narcissistic’ by revealing, slyly, the ideological investments and exclusions of those descriptions, those exclusions. Gestures is not the first book to do this – I am put in mind of the 2016 collection Writing Otherwise, co-edited by Jackie Stacey and Janet Wolff, in which the contributors ‘push against conventional academic modes of writing’ and venture ‘into more exploratory registers’; they employ ‘a more poetic or personal’ style, ‘reflect on the collaborative possibilities of writing otherwise’, and ‘mix visual and textual elements’.³ Gestures, I suggest, takes this further, intensifying the experiment, risking both bafflement and joy.

This is personal writing and announces itself as such – why is this, so often, shameful? Why, Chris Kraus asks in I Love Dick, ‘does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement?’⁴ What should we do with the shame that being personal carries with it and cannot shrug off? For, as Stacey and Wolff elucidate, in the introduction to Writing Otherwise, the ‘personal’ is ‘a deceptively unifying category which obscures the innovative ways in which [the contributors to that volume] also undercut what the idea of the personal so often promises’.⁵ Meanwhile, in the preceding pages of this book, Erin Manning refigures the ‘impersonal’ as ‘an alongsidedness that is capable of catching more than one movement, more than one rhythm, composing a multiplicity’ (Manning and de Montserrat). In Gestures: the ‘personal’ is, it transpires, also political, philosophical, communal, un-individuating, varied. What it countenances (makes room for) is what academic writing so often seeks to suppress or conceal – that is, the desire that motivates and energises research and writing, a kind of yearning to which that writing is never quite adequate (this has been called the shame of writing).⁶ To acknowledge this desire is, then, to produce, in many cases, an intense attentiveness (no surprise that Simone Weil appears in these pages) and an intimacy of engagement with the texts, objects, and others that the writing encounters (it doesn’t feel quite right to say: that the writing is about). Such intimate, attentive engagement doesn’t pretend distance or mask desire.

This is an experimental writing that continually seeks new forms, that crosses the boundaries of genres (erasing those boundaries as it goes), that is alert to the space of the page, that allows itself to be open-ended, that risks failure and disappointment even as it risks a kind of giddy exhilaration. To experiment is to essay, to try, the outcome yet unknown. The idea of experiment has had something of a renaissance in recent scholarship,⁷ even as the institutions of academia give less and less space to open-ended enquiry, to thinking, to anything that cannot be subjected to that driest of metrics, economic value. Experimental writing at its best is thinking; it enacts thought-in-process, with its dead-ends, contradictions, and confusions as well as its epiphanies. It also, as the contributions to Gestures bear out, inquisitively inhabits the space of not-knowing, disdaining mastery. Thus, for example, the ‘ungraspability’ of Gladman’s work, as Hilary White explains, ‘shifts the emphasis, from understanding, as in knowing, to attentiveness’, delivering us ‘forms of fiction not interested in mastering and knowing’ and thwarting our own attempts to master, to contain. Emma Bolland, meanwhile, declares themself ‘An un-master, an anti-master, an un-learner’, exploring how silence, and even incomprehension, might amount to a ‘means of saying no’ (as Anne Boyer reminds us, in ‘No’, ‘Saying nothing is a preliminary method of no. To practice unspeaking is to practice being unbending: more so in a crowd. […] Silence is as often conspiracy as it is consent.’)⁸ If Gladman’s work is ‘always moving towards something unseen’ (White), then the essay-interventions in Gestures do likewise. As the editors attest: ‘The hesitant, in-between spaces of ambivalence and gesture allow for the kinds of unguided thinking and undetermined being, making, and writing which might take us somewhere new, but which are not themselves geared towards progress or conclusion’ (Introduction). I am grateful for this collective gesture of refusal. Modern academia too rarely allows for this kind of ‘unguided’ thinking that isn’t ‘geared towards progress or conclusion’, but good scholarship, good thinking, must be driven by curiosity and imagination; it must be open, always, to the unexpected; it must be allowed to reside (ambivalently, hesitantly, vulnerably) in the gesture. Now there’s a utopian request – not to end with (this is not a closing) but to release into the wild.