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Defined by the compulsive urge to steal often-useless things, kleptomania was first medicalized as a condition in the nineteenth century and was often gendered as a ‘feminine’ disease, much like hysteria.
This day long writing workshop – led by our Writer in Residence, Alice Butler, who has been researching and writing feminist approaches to kleptomania in collaboration with the museum – will resurrect the figure of the kleptomaniac and mine her deviant actions for signs of protest, feminism, perversion, and creativity.
Combining discussion and practice, reading and writing, this session will introduce participants to a range of different approaches to kleptomania in feminist theory, art and writing.
We will read and write closely, even fetishistically.
We will touch books and objects.
We will steal texts, flouting the rules of ownership.
We will produce kleptomaniac writing.
Biography
Alice Butler is a writer and academic based in London. She has recently been awarded her PhD—for the thesis titled “Close Writing: Touching Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller”—from the University of Manchester. She is currently the Freud Museum Writer-in-Residence, where she is working on kleptomania and feminist art. Her art writing has been published in frieze, Cabinet and Art Monthly, amongst other publications.
