My skin is a riot: critical and embodied writing about living in co-occupation with a chronic health condition
Gestures: A body of work, 2025
'My skin is a riot: critical and embodied writing about living in co-occupation with a chronic health condition' is my chapter in the new book Gestures: A body of work, edited by Alice Butler, Nell Osborne, and Hilary White.
The chapter has been developed from a keynote paper I presented at the Gestures conference in 2019.
The book is a cross-disciplinary collection of feminist approaches to 'gesture' that considers the term's complex registers across embodied, aesthetic and political scenes. Attending to gestural movements, languages, feelings and communications, the book argues that gestures can unsettle gendered, sexed and racialised relations, norms and affects. Contributors activate the lens of gesture to offer innovative readings of art and literary works from the 1960s onwards and in transnational contexts. Experiments in art writing and autotheory reflect on the entanglement of the body, gesture and feminist practice. The book proposes that gesture be rethought as a mode of feminist practice that includes art, writing, performance and theory. Mixing disciplines, forms, genres and voices, these contributions and the book's gestural structure offer a bold intervention into the conventions of critical writing.
Published by Manchester University Press, January 2025