Recent texts by women authors point towards an affecting aesthetics which affords physical reactions in their readers. Potential reading experiences of nausea, vertigo and disorientation are repeatedly indicated through textual strategies of visceral representation that focus on affect experiences. In such texts, the reader is confronted with a strategy of aesthesis rather than representation, which, we argue, prompts critical reception to focus on reader response. We discuss and work on these issues with regards to literary works in different languages, as well as from different theoretical and methodological backgrounds, including cultural studies, Indic aesthetics, phenomenological and enactivist / cognitive approaches.

Some of the questions discussed in this group are:

• What is the feminist critique that visceral writing formulates?
• In how far is visceral writing as a contemporary phenomenon linked to other, historical textual strategies? In what kind of relationship do these recent texts stand with queer strategies (Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick), autotheory (Fournier 2022), and more canonical notions that have been understood in a context of feminist practices such as jouissance, écriture feminine, or the stream of consciousness technique?
• Which contemporary and historical authors could expand a tentative comparative canon of visceral writing, and what would its central categories be?