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From Resistance to Revolution: Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich and the Toppling of Patriarchal Poetry

Tue, December 17, 10:15 to 11:45am, Hilton Bayfront San Diego, Aqua 305

Abstract

In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler asks whether, if sexual difference is fundamental to our symbolic order, the symbolic can be “eligible for social intervention.” Put differently, “If it [sexual difference/binary gender] is symbolic, is it changeable?” One way to explore this question is through a consideration of the history of patriarchal poetry, which Rachel Blau DuPlessis contends, is that of “a self-perpetuating and viscous/vicious circle . . . resistant to flow, dependent on reaffirming. . . a binary sex-gender system, with sides. . . and exact borders.”

This paper considers the political affordances of poetry and asks how poetry can make possible the opening up of boundaries and borders for the fluid expression of intersectional identities. Through close readings of poems by Gertrude Stein and Adrienne Rich, I argue that by entering into the symbolic code of American poetry typically coded male, protestant and straight, these queer, female, Jewish writers effected important social and political interventions. My reading of Stein’s poems shows how the high modernist deployed a poetics of surface that resists attempts at penetration and interpretation (“rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”) in her own enactment of a feminist, Jewish poetics marked by purposeful ambiguity and ambivalence in the place of phallogocentric certitude. I read Adrienne Rich’s poetry as unabashedly enacting political revolt through its insistence on rectifying the “damage that was done” by a symbolic order built on false assumptions (about women, Jews, homosexuals and any perceived “other”). By putting these two disparate poets in dialogue I show how despite their very different poetics, each managed, in her own way, to open up the borders of patriarchal poetry. In conclusion, I suggest that the symbolic is not only “eligible for social intervention,” but is in fact “changeable.”

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