This book analyses how three artists - Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero and Mary Kelly - worked with the visual dimensions of language in the 1960s and 1970s. These artists used text and images of writing to challenge female stereotypes, addressing viewers and asking them to participate in the project of imagining women beyond familiar words and images of subordination. The book explores this dimension of their work through the concept of 'the other woman', a utopian wish to reach women and correspond with them across similarities and differences. To make the artwork's aspirations more concrete, it places the artists in correspondence with three writers - Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Laura Mulvey - who also addressed the limited range of images through which women are allowed to become visible.

Reviews

'In looking at the decade that occupies a unique place in the ongoing history of the transnational feminist movement, [Lamm has] uncovered hitherto unassessed materials and proposed insightful new readings in the archives of feminism, whilst also presenting us with an archival rearrangement that produces new objects with which to think about art history.'
Association for Art History

List of figures
Introduction: addressing the other woman
Part I: Writing the 'I' otherwise: telegraphing black feminism in the work of Adrian Piper and Angela Davis
1 Adrian Piper's textual address
2 Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis
Part II: Typing the poetry of monsters: Nancy Spero and Valerie Solanas write aggression
3 Writing the drives in Nancy Spero's Codex Artaud
4 Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression
Part III: Hieroglyphs of maternal desire: the collaborative texts of Mary Kelly and Laura Mulvey
5 Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document
6 Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index