Accidence as method: feminist speculative morphologies and collective practice in the sentence

This project puts the construction of word forms (morphologies) to work on disrupting patriarchal, normative attributions of agency and possession in the sentence. From a feminist resistance to the limiting binaries of English sentence structures (subject/object constructions) I trace how subversions of syntactic relationships – undertaken morphologically – open space for the conceptualisation of feminist collective practices. Accidence, a dated term, describes how, to conform to sentential conditions (such as plurality), words change form. Appreciating the homophony of accidence (which I hear as accidents), I repurpose this linguistic concept. I identify contingent (accidental) elements of English from which I model ambivalent morphologies to trouble the definitive identification (parsing) of a sentential subject. I gather feminist critical and theoretical understandings of syntax to show how the somatic (embodied) sensations of linguistic disorientation, which such morphological gestures induce for a reader, act as a visceral transmission of feminist enquiry. Critically engaging with feminist experimental writing of the 1960s and 70s alongside contemporary queer and feminist writing and theory, the study articulates how deploying contingent gestures that might pass for errors draws out the policed conventions of linguistic space and enables a short-circuited, direct contact with epistemological structures through which patriarchal, normative positionalities and relations persist. Accidence is developed by this project as a method of feminist writing and as a tool for critical analysis. I make new linguistic works of practice realised as texts and audio pieces. Through live solo and collaborative readings of these works the ambivalence my speculative accidence institutes is experienced as multi-voiced sentences, a proliferation of agencies and positions. I extend the critical capacity of contingent textual gestures by supplying, with accidence, forms of repair. These ameliorations expand the duration of the sentence, fabricating a site for a reader to experience emergent collectives nascent in a distributed agency. Establishing polyvocal forms, this research practice situates the conditions for a collectivised refusal of linguistic strictures in the somatic (embodied) sensations of close reading.