This chapter article focuses on Francesca Woodman’s late 1970s fashion photography "attempts". Drawing on the adolescent-attentive work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and the tactile philosophy of Luce Irigaray, it contributes a queer-feminist theorisation and historicisation of the visual/verbal "essay-as-caress", reconfiguring through this lens Woodman's black-and-white photographs of young girl-women and textiles as instances of autoeroticism and feminist perversion.