Dodie Bellamy: “Hoarding as Écriture”

Graduate Lecture Series]
Dodie Bellamy: “Hoarding as Écriture”

Throughout her career, Dodie Bellamy has undermined the fantasy of the autonomous subject. Her work compulsively explores the permeable boundaries between self and other, the conflicting desires to merge with the outside and to protect oneself from invasion. Bellamy will discuss her use of appropriation to trouble the ever-wavering relation between self and culture. For her, cut-ups, collage, citations, and rewritings are more than literary techniques; they betray a libidinal urge to devour and spit up the world.

Dodie Bellamy writes genre-bending works that focus on sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions between fiction, essay, and poetry. Her most recent collection is When the Sick Rule the World. Her chapbook, The Beating of Our Hearts, was published in conjunction with the 2014 Whitney Biennial. With Kevin Killian she edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997 (2017). Also with Killian she curated the 2018 exhibit There’s a Dark Secret in Me: Precarity, Exposure, Camouflage for di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art.

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Image: Tariq Alvi, “Two Hankies: Pony, The Bandaged Lady,” 2005; Linen hanky. Courtesy the artist.