This event marks the publication of Alice Butler’s book Close Writing, which 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 will give an illustrated reading from the book, followed by discussion, and there will be discounted copies of the book available for purchase.
Organised by Professor Jo Applin FBA, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the History of Art and Director of the Centre for the Art of the Americas
Speaker
Alice Butler is a writer and interdisciplinary scholar who specialises in the intersections of recent and contemporary feminist and queer art, writing, and theoretical practices. She teaches in the School of Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art. She has held fellowships at the Freud Museum and the Paul Mellon Centre and was previously Postdoctoral Fellow in the The Courtauld Centre for the Art of the Americas in 2021–2022. 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. She regularly publishes her work across scholarly and creative outputs and contexts, with recent epistolary-themed essays appearing in the journal Bricks from the Kiln, the anthology Correspondences de Appel 1975–2025, and the exhibition catalogue Lifeblood: Munch and the Medicalization of Modern Life. Articles on the lives and works of women artists such as Nan Goldin, Cookie Mueller, and Kathy Acker have also appeared (or are soon to appear) in anthologies on women’s fashion photography, art and the critical medical humanities, and the autobiographical impulse in contemporary art, respectively. She is co-editor of Gestures: A body of work (Manchester University Press, 2025), which includes her article on Francesca Woodman’s ‘autoerotic attentions’. Her monograph Close Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-in-pieces was published by Duke University Press in 2026. She is currently at work on a new book that explores the lives and afterlives of stockings and pantyhose in 1970s–80s feminist art practices.
