Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work

4. Manifests

when much of culture is patriarchal; that is, a poet throwing herself /himself into the abyss. • Feminist poet = a poet who knows what she thinks about gender ideas and arrangements in a culture and does not particularly change her mind. • Feminist poet = a poet who sometimes shows herself/himself to be ironic and skeptical about gender and sexual arrangements, but other times is not, or not overtly. • Feminist poet = a woman protesting the place of woman in culture and society (in her poetry? not in her poetry? I didn’t say). • Feminist poet = one who ¤nds herself and himself “mounting an enormous struggle” within culture, including poetry, because of its deeply constitutive gender ideas. • Feminist poet = male feminist who tries to do gender provocation better than all those women. • Feminist poet = woman poet whose work is selectively seen, certain materials heavily valorized because of the existence of feminist criticism and its paradigms. This is like selecting the poems by Countee Cullen that comment on blackness as the ones most interesting to read now. Note that there is nothing intrinsic about the category—it depends on critical and readerly reception. • Feminist poet = woman poet consumed (studied, read, appreciated) under the regime of or in the economy of feminist perspectives, whether or not she is a feminist. From that contradictory, jubilant, and annoying list there’s sure a lot to choose (and you might want to suggest still more options). Feminism in poetry is absolutely not one position. Indeed, one might say that feminism will circulate among, or manifest itself as, a number of somewhat alternative positions. Further—remember—these might be in®ected with: Difference (women are really different from men; have their own life-themes) (Some women are really different from each other). Androgyny/mental bisexuality (best person is fused genders in some way). Rights/sameness (equality of access, of laws, of treatment, generally). Transcendence (have gender but transcend it—it does not play in the realm where writing is made). Queering (breaking the binarist gender norm; resisting any social and aesthetic forms that depend on binarist hierarchies). More than all this, we have uncovered a large area of terminological ambiguity that has to be raised but might be impossible to resolve. Arcade 15. A lot of the above list is implicitly about production. That is— 64 / Attitudes and Practices to de¤ne feminism in poetry, many people have settled on a feminism of production: having the poem “come forth” as a “statement” that shows certain “ideas” or “themes” or “identities” or “images.” But all of this is why I do not want a “feminism of production” to be taken as the central cultural act performed by feminists and their intellectual kin. Instead, I want to say a very positive word for the feminism of reception. What does this mean? To maintain feminist (that is, gender-alert) reception is crucial, not to insist that certain forms, styles, strategies, subjectivities, themes are more female, feminine, male, masculine, gay, straight, queer on the level of production. The feminism of reception means a high level of analysis making legible gender materials and the materials of other social matrices, and showing a subtle alertness to the play of gender (and other social mechanisms) and its deep structures, in culture, everywhere. Gender-alert, materialist-in®ected reception is interested in the discussion of social location not only of artists but of genres, discourses, images, textualities, ideologies, communities, and of critics. Feminist reception demands that everything that has been written needs ample, multiple modes of gender analysis. And feminist reception can solve the problem of grouping women poets together for whatever reasons—for this is an act of reception. Arcade 16. Feminist cultural poetics has, to date, primarily engaged itself with female subjectivity and female agency, but with the tools developed from this phase of feminist thinking, one can begin to talk about male subjectivities and agency. Thinking about gendered subjectivities, performative genderings, styles of femaleness or maleness, sexualities as represented in artworks, thinking about ideological attitudes to gender of any individual author are all modal moves within the feminism of reception.13 One little attitudinal (and therefore methodological) practice that one might learn from the practice of feminist criticism—whether or not one likes, admires, cathects to, or loves any individual woman writer—is the necessity to offer at least as much empathetic understanding to the products of women as to those of men. This is linked to the historical responsibility to examine what women...