For the past year, I have been working on my book manuscript, tentatively titled “Assembled Feminisms: Performative Sculpture and the Politics of Touch.” While my research on artist Beverly Buchanan remains front of mind, I have been digging into my project’s proposed intellectual framework around the relational and affective experience of touch, at once attending to touch as a sensorial experience and an ethical circuit. My manuscript proposes the idea of “a haptic imaginary,” wherein touch—whether literal or imagined—becomes the central mode of encounter and way of knowing one another. Unlike the unidirectional mode of seeing, where one consumes an object via sight and is largely unconcerned with consent, touch is inherently reflexive and relational: At once, one touches and is touched. I’m curious about this relational exchange and its epistemological possibilities. This study routes touch through sculptural materialities and is especially invested in artists working during the second half of the 20th century, who were critiquing second-wave feminism and its explicit focus on monetized labor through the fight for equal wages (and its tacit maintenance of the structures of whiteness and capitalism). Why did so many artists who identify as women turn toward unconventional artmaking materials (nylon panty hose, plastics, latex, natural fibers, tabby concrete, silk, etc.) during the long 1970s? How do these alternative materialities relate to the experience of embodiment? What kinds of knowledges are conjured by these materials and their specific histories? What can be gained from thinking through touching these materials, and memories of physical interaction with these materials—thus touching histories rather than simply ingesting them optically? In addition to Buchanan’s experiments with tabby concrete, I also attend to the practices of Senga Nengudi, Olga de Amaral, Maren Hassinger, Heidi Bucher, Feliza Bursztyn, Ana Mendieta, Jackie Winsor, Lygia Clark, and others. This work is interdisciplinary: I use the methods and histories of material sciences, medical humanities, health sciences, and (dis)ability studies. I am grateful to the Center for its continued support and look forward to continuing my research.