We are delighted to announce that The Happy Hypocrite – Silver Bandage, issue 11 is guest edited by Erica Scourti and due to be published in January 2019.

The Happy Hypocrite is now looking for submissions to this forthcoming issue, Silver Bandage, featuring contributions by CAConrad and Daniella Valz Gen.

Submission deadline: midnight 2 July 2018

Please send submissions to:

Erica Scourti

The Happy Hypocrite, Submissions

c/o Book Works

19 Holywell Row
London 
EC2A 4JB

Or email:
happyhypocrite@bookworks.org.uk

The human body has long been a site of experiment, subject to invasive processes of measurement, tracking, discipline and control. The Mosso Ergograph of 1890, developed as a means of quantifying fatigue, is part of a history of biometric apparatuses that in their current incarnations monitor sweat rate, heart beat and iris contractions, regulating these ‘somatic markers’ in the interest of efficiency and identification, often curtailing freedoms by profiling people according to raced and gendered norms.

I’m looking for new forms of writing against total psychosomatic legibility, embracing texts and/or images that try and represent the impossibility of quantifying ‘vibes’, that deal in the intangible erotic energies inhabiting spaces between people when speaking/dancing/singing/writing, or that use hybrid languages, articulate muscle memories, limbic reactions and knowledge held in the guts, in blushes, reflex reactions, postures and yawns. Figuring the bodymind as sometimes hostile, sometimes hospitable, occasionally entering states where stresses may be externalised to the point of ecstatic loss, I’m also wondering how processes of (mis)translation, contamination, commingling and exchange can take place in ways that redefine conceptions of inside and outside, self and other, guest and host, without privileging strength. With figures like Paul B. Preciado’s auto-guinea pig, the parasite, and the pidgin in mind, I hope to assemble these writings/images in the spirit of friendship and love, editing towards an ecology of reparative relations.

– Erica Scourti