Thinking of You: Writing Feminist Scholarship, One Letter at a Time

Epistolary praxis is an intervention, an unruly form of academic writing that increases the dialogic potential as well as personal and emotional investment in scholarly exchange. Anne Bower argues that, “Although the epistolary form does not always allow us to say different things than we can within traditional argumentation or via the personal essay, it can signal a definitive shift in attitude toward our material, ourselves, and our readers.”
In this epistolary conversation, two feminist-artist-scholars turn to correspondence as a mode of writing feminist scholarship, slowly and durationally across space and time. Their near-decade of writing letters is just one mode of building feminist futures, a collaborative and relational process that Alex Martinis Roe describes as “valuing and constructing authorship differently.” They recommend readings to each other and share ideas, slowly weaving together themes of care, attunement, and embodied practices, alongside some reflection on the transformative potential of letters. In this excerpt from their correspondence, the authors take cues from other writers and artists who work with letters: their epistolary praxis both enacts relational connection and lays a foundation to develop new, shared thinking together, which is made possible only by the exchange itself.