New Orientations: Touch in Women's Experimental Writing

Through the analysis of women's experimental writing, this thesis examines the significance of touch in exceeding individual and social boundaries, contending that touch has the radical potential to elicit transformation. This thesis explores the way in which touch materialises throughout the experimental works of Audre Lorde, Anaïs Nin, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Kathy Acker, arguing that experimental writing facilitates an affective language of touch and sensation that resists and moves beyond societally gendered, racialised, and compulsory heterosexualised constructs of tactile relations. By doing so, this research gestures toward the queer nature of touch to exceed normative frameworks and boundaries posed by conventional language, illuminating, in the readings of these experimental texts, new orientations for thinking through the radical potentials of touch, as a site of resistance that disrupts conventional modes of relation. Within these experimental texts, a politics of touch materialises both thematically and contextually, as well as through the experimental form itself, that operates as a site of counter politics to mainstream ideas of sexual relations. By engaging with contemporary feminist studies that take up issues of touch, such as Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), this thesis proposes that touch functions as an 'orientation device' that informs what it means to be in relation to another. Touch has radical potentialities for transformation through its ability to orientate, reorientate and disorientate the subjects' bodies. Touch, therefore, precipitates change when bodies no longer follow the lines that have previously orientated them, but instead envision new orientations.