Sarah Guilbault

Sarah can be found drinking tea and writing letters on her green 1952 Smith-Corona typewriter. With a background in Political Theory and Gender & Sexuality Studies, her current research focuses on queer friendship, ghostly traces, postal infrastructure, and letters as a means of touch and of witnessing in precarious times. Lately, her performance work explores eeriness, play and diffusions of queer intimacies.

Title of Project

Touch and Go: Correspondent Hauntings through the USPS

Description of Project

When nearly all communication is immediate and via screens, personalized mail is tangibly intimate. The physical item transforms during and after its creation: paper is bent, stamped, touched by many hands. Letters are charged with desire, mourning, and ghostliness. This project explores “snail mail” as a potential mode of distal touch and venue for creating sense in common. Letter writing is both a practice and an indication of our entanglement and our responsibility to enact care in precarious circumstances.

Project Inspiration

This project is inspired by years of letter writing and an obsession with the tactility of letters. The project and the letters themselves are a means of care and survival. Let’s be in touch. x

Areas of Academic Interest

queer theory, psychoanalysis, affect, absurdity, ghosts, indigenous studies