This paper reflects on the reading and discussion group ‘Sick, Sick, Sick’: The Books of Ornery Women; a Glasgow and web-based open reading project examining a radical or ‘bludgeoned’ subjectivity of female writers. Programmed between November 2013 to November 2014, the reading programme contrasted the work of new female writers emerging from the online Alt-Lit scene with the late nineties Semiotext(e) ‘Native Agents’ publications under the editorial directorship of Chris Kraus, and extended to post-critical precursor texts by authors including Kathy Acker.

Collectively, the group explored tensions between language, sociology, subjectivity and power-relations and how such issues impact upon gender and take form in the text. We asked how authors using their own biography, bodies and emotional lives as material disrupt expected hierarchical sequences or to what extent such corporeal texts might reproduce them.

The project aimed to prioritise the reader in an environment designed for collaborative and discursive interpretation. Paralleling the collapsed critical distance so often performed in the selected readings, we produced the possibility of an empathetic conversational exchange between writer and reader. As a group of readers (ourselves writers, researchers, artists and more) we interacted with authors who experiment with language as referential material—further extending a relational and associative practice that explores modes of authorship beyond the individual expressing herself.

Initiated by Emma Balkind (GSA) and Laura Edbrook in collaboration with MAP, Glasgow, the project attended to the online Alt-Lit scene’s already established multifaceted modes of reading and writing and occupied, and developed by way of, a number of intersecting platforms. The reading group met at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Glasgow, and was accompanied by a commissioned events programme. Online blog and twitter dialogue expanded the forum to include contributions from international readers and authors.