Across the Acheron

In this genre- and gender-breaking work of theory-fiction, legendary writer and cofounder of the 1970s French feminist movement Monique Wittig celebrates the body—lesbian, literary and defiantly political—and challenges the order of heterosexuality in literature. 

First published in French in 1973, The Lesbian Body mines the relationship between a lover and a beloved—also a writer and a text—to explore the ideological and historical constructions of the female subject. Organized according to the principle of montage, poetic passages are juxtaposed with anatomic lists that mark lesbian eros. Through expressions of joy, violence, and tenderness, the site of pleasure is celebrated. In her transfiguration of gender and its paradigms, Wittig transformed French vocabulary, feminizing grammar and lesbianizing myths. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig’s groundbreaking work back into circulation for the first time since the mid-1980s, revised according to the author's notes, and with an introduction by Paul B. Preciado.

“The Lesbian Body is a fundamental work of lesbian existence. Wittig's applied vision is a state of natural delirium, a revolutionary excess of utopianism, refusal, and mutual self-creation. Revisiting it reveals how much passionate free thought has been lost, and simultaneously, how many of her tropes and discoveries have integrated into our collective consciousness.” — Sarah Schulman

“In this stunning new rendering of The Lesbian Body by the French author, theorist, activist and teacher, the late Monique Wittig, we are plunged into an imagined world of passionate violence and erotic lesbian mayhem intertwined in strikingly bold poetic images. Wittig, in the reach and volatility of her imagination, stands alongside such important American writers as Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Valerie Solanas, all of whose work deserves to be read again, or for the first time.” — Esther Newton

“To read the book is to be forced by Wittig into another grammar and happily contaminated by its strange forms. You will never think straight again.” — Jack Halberstam

“For me, Wittig opened up a sense of the world that had been, quite literally, unimaginable. She tore us apart.” — Judith Butler

“Together with Ursula Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany, Wittig is the first to design a nonbinary utopia, a world in which the binary categorization of sexes and genders will have ceased to exist.” — Paul B. Preciado

Introduction by Paul B. Preciado
Translated by David Le Vay

In her first book of poems, Leah Flax Barber revives an actress figure of the commedia dell'arte to consider her own destiny as a soon-to-be historical subject. Taking its title from Marguerite Porete's fourteenth-century Beguine classic, The Mirror of Simple Souls embodies the metaphysical thorniness of the book-as-object through sources as wide-ranging as Renaissance theater, Low German and Old French mystical texts, Kate Bush lyrics, and the melancholy dialectics of Walter Benjamin. In Flax Barber's stark, brutally compressed poems, the performance of writing is charged with the eros and anxiety of coming after: "Will it all be destroyed? / Definitely / I will hear it on my radio / In the 22nd century."

The Mirror of Simple Souls, a series of repeated beginnings and endings, is a form of speech act which, through a Freudian Durcharbeiten, or working through, brings about a new beginning. And, in its movement from this Freudian "working through" to a Hegelian Aufhebung, lets us begin, again, at the beginning, at the end. —CYNTHIA CRUZ

The spare poems of The Mirror of Simple Souls evoke and then draw back into shimmer. Herein, a performance that suffuses the horizon with beautiful absurdity: a shirt sewn with mirrors that reflect a strange and evanescing world-at-large, “an I where the nay was.” Drawing from film, mystical texts, commedia dell'arte, the reader finds that there “is paraphernalia of life / all over.” This paraphernalia is a kind of “segue music” for the endlessly indeterminate. The old adage claims that we can’t step into the same river twice, but Leah Flax Barber creates an evocative, provocative current through which each step is at once past, present, and future. —ELIZABETH ROBINSON

Leah Flax Barber is a daring and brilliant new poet. Her voice is restless and coiled and sprung as we discover "The demonic finalist / Of material culture / Is love / There is paraphernalia of life / All over / A woman.” There is also a take-no-prisoners attitude throughout this startling and powerful book. These poems are vital and necessary and perform “The wounded chance / To think in public.” This book will move you, scare you, and blow you away. —PETER GIZZI

Leah Flax Barber's first book reads like a journey, a kind of anabasis, passing back through the myth and history which are its own antecedents. It manifests, in the encounter, a saturnalian world: ludic, dark and sensuous, strange and vibrant with thought. I was delighted to travel with it. —CLAIRE DeVOOGD

Sticky Fingers' Fortune Teller features wisdom from McKenzie Wark, Octavia E. Butler, Kate Zambreno, bell hooks, Clarice Lispector, Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker, Johanna Hedva, Lou Sullivan, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Anne Boyer.⁣

A3, single colour risograph

This bootleg edition collects scanned copies of Monique Wittig's writing. It includes; The Lesbian Body, Les Guérillères, The Opoponax, and Lesbian Peoples: material for a dictionary— In true bootleg style, punk enough to carry the truly radical words of Wittig: scans, a little grainy, with marginalia of unknown origins. Now, we can dress ourselves in the ravishingly erotic, violent splendorous brilliance to become baby Wittigs.  

This edition was assembled out of a deep love of Wittig's work by Chloe Chignell.

Monique Wittig was a French author and feminist theorist particularly interested in overcoming gender and the heterosexual contract. She published her first novel, L'opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism.

A woman replays her abandonment by her mother, who is sometimes addressed as a male mother-god. She is also abandoned by her lover, to whom she is in thrall. She tries repeatedly to make or receive phone calls with the beloved figures, without success. She waits for their letters and imagines their contents. In a dream-like, torrid sequence, suffering, fear, fatigue and imperfection are apostrophised. Forgetting is examined and toyed with from every angle. Mythical hybrid creatures are invoked: a snake-headed lion, wolf-snakes, a wolf-peacock. How did this come to be? In a cunningly, wittily wrought rush, the unique, unpredictable voice of the narrator speaks from multiple perspectives to express powerful anguish and, ultimately, catharsis.

‘Cixous reminds us that women have long spoken from a wound… To be is already to be abandoned, already to have lost, and still to love. To read Cixous is to tarry with this open wound, to hear how writing becomes testimony to its own possibility.’  Jamieson Webster

‘Language in Cixous’s hands is molten, constantly opening onto fresh possibilities.’  Maggie Nelson

‘With Hélène Cixous you must close your eyes and open your mouth. Wider. So open your throat opens. Your esophagus. Your lungs. Wider. So open your spine unclatters. Your hips swim loose. Your womb worlds itself. Wider. Open the well of your sex. Now speak your body from your other mouth. Yell corporeal prayer. This is writing.’  Lidia Yuknavitch

Foreword by Jamieson Webster

Textdemic | A Retrospective on Jenny Holzer’s Laments” Ed. by A.L. Steiner and GenderFail, a publication based on A.L. Steiner + Friends on Jenny Holzer at Dia Chelsea. This book is based on the Artists on Artists Lecture Series when the Dia Art Foundation invited Steiner to curate a public program based on a work of the artist's choice.

Steiner chose Jenny Holzer’s Laments and invited Morgan Bassichis, Riel Bellow, Gregg Bordowitz, Alexander Chee, Malik Gaines, Guadalupe Maravilla + Alexa Mishell Guillen, Lucas Michael, Eileen Myles and Pamela Sneed to present in Dia’s first in-person program after the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2021. This publication features records of the poems, lectures, and performances during this memorial program. The book's design plays homage to the 1990 Laments publication by the Dia Art Foundation.

For this publication, Steiner and GenderFail invited Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, Associate Curator at Dia Art Foundation and the organizer of the Artists on Artists Lecture Series, to write an afterword for the book. In this, she states: "Dispensing altogether with the monographic formula that characterizes the institution, for her Lecture A.L. Steiner convened a group of artists, writers, and activists to join her in responding to Jenny Holzer’s 1989 text-based installation, Laments. Holzer identified the thirteen texts that comprise Laments as 'voices of the dead,' a visual choir in response to the raging HIV/AIDS epidemic and government inaction. Over the protracted COVID-19 lockdown, Steiner developed the idea to organize an evening for the voices of the living to lament today's crises.”

In Dodie Bellamy's imagined "sequel" to Bram Stoker's fin de siècle masterpiece Dracula, Van Helsing's plain Jane secretarial adjunct, Mina Harker, is recast as a sexual, independent woman living in San Francisco in the 1980s. The vampire Mina Harker, who possesses the body of author Dodie Bellamy, confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four vastly different men through past letters. Simultaneously, a plague is let loose in San Francisco-the plague of AIDS.

Bigger-than-life, half goddess, half Bette Davis, Mina sends letter after letter to friends and co-conspirators, holding her reader captive through a display of illusion and longing. Juggling quivering vulnerability on one hand and gossip on the other, Mina spoofs and consumes and spews back up demented reembodiments of trash media and high theory alike. It's all fodder for her ravenous libido and "a messy ambiguous place where pathology meets pleasure." Sensuous and captivating, The Letters of Mina Harker describes one woman's struggles finding the right words to explain her desires and fears without confining herself to one identity.

When conventional language does not equip us with the tools to speak about ourselves, we create our own. Slang expresses words and feelings that break down boundaries. It is a form of protest and fills in the gaps.

The Queer Arab Glossary is the first published collection of Arabic LGBTQ+ slang. This bold guide captures the lexicon of the queer Arab community in all its differences, quirks and felicities. Featuring fascinating facts and anecdotes, it contains more than 300 terms in both English and Arabic, ranging from the humorous to the harrowing, serious to tongue-in-cheek, pejorative to endearing. Here, leading queer Arab artists, academics, activists and writers offer insightful essays situating this groundbreaking glossary in a modern social and political context.

With beautiful, witty illustrations, The Queer Arab Glossary is a powerful response to pervasive myths and stereotypes around sexuality and an invitation to take a journey into queerness throughout the Arab world.

Contributors include Saqer Almarri, Nisrine Chaer, Sophie Chamas, Rana Issa, Adam HajYahia, Suneela Mubayi, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, Hamed Sinno and Abdellah Taïa.

The Queer Arab Glossary was made possible with the generous support of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture – AFAC, Mophradat, Bashar Assaf and Mohammed Fakhro.

Foreword by Rabih Alameddine