MsHeresies 5 — We Are Going to Lose

MsHeresies 6 publishes an edited chapter from Caren Beilin’s forthcoming novel Sea, Poison (New Directions, 2025). It is typeset together with reworked material from the archive of the Neapolitan feminist artist collective Le Nemesiache, active between 1969 and 1995.

How do we care for each other in our living, learning and working lives? The manual Promiscuous Infrastructures Practicing Care calls for an ethics of care and attentiveness to one another, re-imagines the making and the use of infrastructures, and situates care within a genealogy of artistic and social practice.

Promiscuous Infrastructures brings together more than twenty contributors - art and social practitioners, researchers, and educators - including the twelve core members of the Promiscuous Care Study Group, who have been researching and writing about caring infrastructures and promiscuous care for several years. This project takes seriously the urgent need to imagine diverse infrastructures of care at every scale of planetary existence. The resulting interdisciplinary publication comprises essays, visual schematics and scores, personal letters, recipes, and conversations, which emerge from the work of the study group, situated around the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam.

In society at large, the adjective “promiscuous” is commonly understood as a derogatory term, but it originally referred to people or things that “mingled confusedly or indiscriminately.”

The promiscuity the title explores is defined by a clear and collective refusal of efficiency, and favors generosity, care, love, and attention. Together, the group and their interlocutors situate their own collective care practice within a genealogy of artistic and general social practice. Adopting the UK-based Care Collective’s understanding of promiscuous, which aims toward multiplying and experimenting with caring practices beyond the shriveled forms that prevail today, Promiscuous Infrastructures addresses the following themes: institutional change, communal responsibility and accountability practices, mental health and collective care, hospitality and hosting, soil, counter-histories, intergenerational learning, joy and collective grief, and the poetics of imagining otherwise. These themes nurture a practice of multiplying and experimenting in diverse and expansive ways.

In this publication being promiscuous means taking agency within and beyond the shared context of structurally dispassionate cultural and educational institutions that require innovation, expediency, and measurable results above all.

Contributors: Carla Arcos, Jacquill Basdew, Selma Bellal, Seecum Cheung, Cooking Something Up, Yoeri Guépin, Marc Herbst, Czar Kristoff P., Pablo Lerma, Judith Leijdekkers, Carmen José, Edwin Mingard, Skye Maule-O’Brien, Lola Olufemi, Laurence Rassel, Vivian Sky Rehberg, Reading Room Rotterdam, Kari Robertson, Yusser al Obaidi, Michelle Teran, Renée Turner, and Julia Wilhelm.

I travel far across the city, cut it knowingly, concealing behind me the entrances to tunnels, altering the signage. I traverse the grimiest bowels, skirt the farthest wettest edges like a silverfish active only in the hallucinatory hours, to avoid becoming known, to avoid any collusion between my body and theirs, its. 

Under the neon sky of a sick city, which might be London, a nameless governess oscillates between lucidity and dissociation, solitude and communication, wage labour and escape attempts. A wild and unreliable narrator-without-character—ardent, delirious, complicit, vengeful, and paranoid—she embodies a perverse and chaotic resistance. Simultaneously demonic and angelic, both maniacal and generous in her fury, accidentally elegant, tongue tied and barbed, she veers towards defiance as devotion. An anti-Bildungsroman in the collapsing first person, Yes, I Am A Destroyer is an unbecoming record of memory and forgetting, of a relentless undoing. 

‘Any girl who learns how to read is already a lost girl, wrote the infamous confessionalist Rousseau. But if that lost girl, with insatiable pronoun, bastard spawn perhaps of the exiled Genevan, palmed a pen and confessed—how would that read? What can she know? With relentless intelligence and urgent prosody, Mira Mattar shows us. She invents a narrator in the raging anti-tradition of Violette Leduc and Albertine Sarrazin, leaps beyond the cloying contract of capital with the feminine, of intimacy with violence, to animate a lush document of the refusal of subjection. Much like the young Jean-Jacques, she’s a tutor underpaid for her sensitivity. She is, like him, a thief of small things, a sponge for the edifying comportments of the employing class. What she makes of her servitude—a fabulously grotesque encyclopedia of sensing—is dedicated to female anger. Scrubbing, washing, chewing, frigging, barfing, stealing, moisturising, shitting: every surface, every gesture, is appropriated to her bodily resistance.  ‘Live anyway’ is her stoic motto. This glorious tract ends with a call for the anarchical vigour of the animal body we share. Read it and flourish. You will perhaps be invoiced.’ 
–> Lisa Robertson 

Mira Mattar writes fiction and poetry. She is an independent researcher, editor, and tutor. A Palestinian/Jordanian born in the suburbs of London, she continues to live and work there. She has read and published her work widely. Yes, I Am A Destroyer is her first book.

Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among others.

A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, "I," and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language.

Sphinx is a landmark text in the feminist and LGBT literary canon appearing in English for the first time.

Anne Garréta (b. 1962) is a lecturer at the University of Rennes II and research professor of literature and Romance studies at Duke University. She joined the Oulipo in 2000, becoming the first member to join born after the Oulipo was founded. Garréta won France's prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002, awarded each year to an author whose "fame does not yet match their talent," for her novel Pas un jour.

Emma Ramadan is a graduate of Brown University and received her master's in literary translation from the American University of Paris. Her translation of Anne Parian's Monospace is forthcoming from La Presse. She is currently on a Fulbright Fellowship for literary translation in Morocco.

Half pre-adolescent gothic fantasia, half inter-species rumor mongering, and half amulet of protection, The Wolfboy of Rego Park is jam-packed with fists of fury, monstrous characterization, puerile recklessness and looney tunes ruminations set afloat in a gooey colloidal suspension. Pin your hair down and take a spin on this merry-go-round of wayward urban woolgathering.

An unnamed, female narrator travels through school, then art school, then art school teaching jobs, finding or fashioning “the selves of herself” via encounters with PJ Harvey, the ghosts of Ann Quin, Susan Sontag, and a mansplaining Analyst that she first encounters in her grandparents’ garden. Both a love letter to creative life, and a requiem for all that is lost in its pursuit, UH HUH HER asks is it possible to record—and retain—our experiences of being on the outside? Or can such stories only exist within the institutions that both literally and metaphorically shape them?

Cactus erotica. Dykes taking T erotica. Handmade rope erotica. 
Tangentially alien erotica. Clit long like laffy taffy erotica. Death erotica.

In L.A. Warman's anti-sequel to her award-winning debut Whore Foods, two anonymous lovers traverse the vast and lonely desert which has blighted most of the continent. In their possession is the gift of the Vapors, a mystical substance which allows them to transcend death. Yet as they explore the desert realm and each other, they cannot help but wonder if their entwined destiny resides somewhere beyond transcendence.

LA Warman is a poet, performer, and teacher currently based in New York City. Warman is the author of Whore Foods, an erotic novella which recieved a Lambda Literary Award in 2020. She is the founder of Warman School, a non-accredited and body based learning center. The Warman School has taught over 500 students online and in person. She teaches topics such as erotics, death, depression, and god. Pitchfork named her piece ADMSDP one of the top 100 songs of 2020. She has had performance and installation work in shows at MOCA Cleveland, ICA Philadelphia, Time-Based Art Festival, Poetry Project, and Open Engagement. Warman has presented performative poetics research at Brown University, Hamilton College, Reed College, Hampshire College, and others. She is a founding organizer of the Free Ashley Now survivor defense campaign.

"This book is an instant waypoint on my return to the revelation: if nothing else, my tears have a place where they belong—mixed into the dust of others." — Wilmer Wilson IV