CFP SPECIAL ISSUE OF ANGLES - NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE ANGLOPHONE WORLD

PUBLICATION DATE: APRIL 2027

THE LIVES AND AFTERLIVES OF COOKIE MUELLER: TALES, KINSHIPS, PERSISTENCE

“Cookie Mueller was a writer, a mother, an outlaw, an actress, a fashion designer, a go-go dancer, a witch-doctor, an art-hag, and above all, a goddess,” U.S. director John Waters wrote in 1997 as a tribute to both Cookie Mueller's multiple talents and her status as a cultural icon. Cookie Mueller (1949-1989) is probably best known for her small parts in Waters’ early movies (Multiple Maniacs, 1970; Pink Flamingos, 1972; Female Trouble, 1974; Desperate Living, 1977) and for befriending many artists, including Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She was, however, also a gifted writer, who wrote health columns for the East Village Eye, a memoir, a theater play, as well as a series of nonsensical portraits/short stories entitled How to Get Rid of Pimples (1984). Cookie Mueller was one of the many victims of the AIDS epidemic. Her life and death were documented by Nan Goldin in The Cookie Portfolio 1976-1989 (https://fracauvergne.fr/oeuvre/the-cookie-mueller-portfolio-cookie-mueller/). 

This special issue aims to investigate the lives and afterlives of Cookie Mueller through three main topics:

1. 1.     Tales, Tall and True: Cookie Mueller’s Writings

This part will focus specifically on Cookie Mueller as a writer and the legacy of her work through the following possible topics:

• Cookie Mueller’s writings and their specificities: her use of autobiography/life-writing; humor, “wit,” and the importance of the anecdote in her writings; her use of prescriptive writing through her advice columns (“Ask Dr. Mueller”).

• Cookie Mueller as journalist: her art columns as well as the journalistic scenes she wrote about specific neighborhoods/communities in the 1980s.

• Cookie Mueller in relation to contemporary women writers such as Eve Babitz, Joan Didion, and Kathy Acker.

• Translated / transmedial Cookie: the revival of her stories through translations (French, German and Spanish) and adaptations (on stage).

2. Kinships and Meeting Grounds

This section will illuminate the figure of Cookie Mueller through Jack Halberstam’s project to investigate “the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing” (2005). It addresses what Cookie Mueller’s lives and afterlives can teach us about the creation of connections with and without “bio-genetic-centered kinship” (Weeks 2021), as well as the sites where they were created through the following possible topics:

• The networks of artists and the “local scenes” in which Cookie Mueller was a central feature (in Baltimore, New York, Provincetown, San Francisco); the importance and promise of urban environments now deeply changed by gentrification; the specific neighborhoods but also spaces and venues that fostered the interactions/encounters/cohabitations that were in turn at the heart of much of Cookie Mueller’s storytelling; queer and urban scenes.

• Friendships and emotional networks; queer kinships v. bio-genetic kinships.

• Risk-taking and lack of safety as central in Cookie Mueller’s life and escape from family and heteronormative and suburban lifestyles (Schulman 2012, Halberstam 2005)—“Unsafe was her middle name” (Waters in Griffin 2015). 

3. Epidemics: Mourning, Melancholy, Militancy, Memory

Before being a victim of AIDS herself, Cookie Mueller witnessed and experienced firsthand the scope of the AIDS epidemic and its toll among her friends, artists, “the kind of people who lifted the quality of all our lives” (Mueller 1997). While not necessarily focusing on Cookie Mueller exclusively, this section will specifically investigate the AIDS epidemic, arts, and activism, in relation to Douglass Crimp’s work on mourning in the context of the epidemic (Crimp 1989). 

• Cookie Mueller and AIDS: her own texts on/around AIDS; the representation of the sick body. 

• Photographer Nan Goldin’s work as curator of Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at the time of Cookie’s dying; Nan Goldin’s Cookie Portfolio as an antidote to loss; her relationship with Cookie and reckoning with AIDS and how this influenced her art and activism, as evidenced in the documentary by Laura Poitras All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2023).

• The threat of erasure and importance of public persistence or mourning of the dead in the context of the AIDS epidemic and of the willful obliteration/marginalization of the ill. 

• A lost generation; the broken link with younger artists and interrupted transmission (this can include curatorial, editorial and artistic endeavors, as well as translation projects around Cookie Mueller's work).

This special issue is open to different formats, including academic essays, roundtables, readings, interviews and video essays. 

Abstracts (350-400 words) should be submitted to the guest editors by February 1, 2025: 

Hélène Cottet: helene.cottet@univ-lille.fr

Claire Hélie: claire.helie@univ-lille.fr

Corinne Oster: corinne.oster@univ-lille.fr

Hélène Quanquin: helene.quanquin@univ-lille.fr

Articles will be due by December 1, 2025.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

By Cookie Mueller

Books

How to Get Rid of Pimples. New York: Top Stories, [1984] 2021. Photos by David Armstrong, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar. 2e éd. 2021.

Fan Mail, Frank Letters and Crank Calls. New York: Hanuman Books, 1988. 

Garden of Ashes. New York: Hanuman Books, 1990.

Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black. Ed. Hedi El Kholti, Chris Kraus and Amy Scholder. New York: Semiotext(e), [1990] 2022.

Ask Dr Mueller: The Writings of Cookie Mueller. Ed. Amy Scholder. New York: High Risk Books, 1997. 

Collaborations

with Glenn O’Brien. Drugs: a comedy stage play [1985]. Los Angeles: The Kingsboro Press, 2016.

with Nan Goldin and Guido Costa. Ten Years After: Naples 1986-1996. West Zone, 1998.

with Nan Goldin. Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. New York: Artists Space, 1989.

———. Cookie Mueller: Photographs. New York: Pace/MacGill Gallery, 1991.

with Vittorio Scarpati. Putti’s Pudding. Kyoto: Kyoto Shoin, 1989.

Translations

Schmid, Hans. Durch klares Wasser gehend in einem Pool schwarz gestrichen. Belleville, 2024. 

Olavarria, Rodrigo. Caminar por aguas cristalinas: en una piscina pintada de negro. Los Tres Editores, 2024. 

Vinet-Kammerer, Romaric. Traversée en eau claire dans une piscine peinte en noire. Finitude, 2017. 

———. Comme une version arty de la réunion de couture. Finitude, 2019. 

Secondary Sources

Crimp, Douglas. “Mourning and Militancy.” October, vol. 51 (Winter, 1989), pp. 3-18.

---. “Melancholia and Moralism” in David L. Eng and David Kazanjian ed., Loss, The Politics of Mourning, 2003, pp. 188-202.

Barnett, L. J.  “‘Cookie in Her Casket’ as a response to the Medical Death. And Death Shall Have Dominion: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Dying, Caregivers, Death, Mourning, and the Bereaved.” 2015. https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848884182

Curley, Mallory. A Cookie Mueller Encyclopedia. S.I.: Randy Press, 2010.

Goldin Kathleen Chapman, Mia Du Plessis. “Against Vanishing: Cookie Mueller and Nan.”  CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 21, Number 2, Fall 2021, pp. 127-167. 

Goldin, Nan. “Nan Goldin on Cookie Mueller” In Digital Journalist <http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0106/voices_goldin.htm> 2001.

Griffin, Chloë. Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller. Berlin: b-books Verlag, 2015.

Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York University Press, 2005.

Lebovici Elisabeth. Ce que le sida m’a fait. Art et activisme à la fin du XXe siècle. Les Presses du réel (2017); JRP éditions (2021). 

Muckle, Samantha M. Visual Archives of the AIDS Epidemic: Examining the Cultivation of Anticipatory Mourning in the Works of Nan Goldin, Cookie Mueller, and Vittorio Scarpati. PhD dissertation, Scripps College, 2020.

Quinlivan, Raena Lynn. Corporeality and the Rhetoric of Feminist Body Art. PhD dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 2008.

Schulman Sarah. The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. University of California Press, 2012.

Summersgill, Lauren. “Family Expressions of Pain in Postmortem Portraiture.” Studies in Visual Arts and Communication: An International journal Vol 2, No 1, 2015.

Walker, Sybil. “Cookie Mueller.” The East Village Eye (1981): 41.

Weeks, K. “Abolition of the Family: The Most Infamous Feminist Proposal.” Feminist Theory 24.3 (2021): 433-453.