Feminist Truth, Power, and Desire-at-Large: Developing The “I” in Contemporary Women’s Textual Practices

Over their lifetimes, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich wrote extensively on womanhood to capture the nuances of the grand scope of interpersonal relationships between women. One of the simplest feminist tenets I see clearly in their work is the value each placeson exchange—focusing on honor and connection between people, and especially amongst women. I am particularly drawn to where Lorde writes that “The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person,” and where Rich writes that “The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy.” In a sense I think that they exalt the connective nature of human pursuits, focusing on the virtues that have been translated down and morphed through antiquity westward into our contemporary culture.

In my feminist view, American politics have been deeply unkind to women in recent years. I would be unwise, I think, to remain ignorant of the work of my forebears; theirs is a particular canon I would like to be well-read in and employ as I turn to my own work. In nearly all of the English classrooms that were teaching poetry, I remember hearing the epithet-like “personal” and “political” in nearly every discussion. Thankfully, for the assignments in this class, and gratefully, for the wonderful experience and access to the wider world, one of the most historically reputed acts of both the political sphere and expression of the personal is poetry. I intend to write with a lens attuned to the wealth of feminist art, poetry, and scholarship of the late 20th century and 21st century. These lineages are built upon one another and interwoven. The practice of autotheory and its methods of scholarship have also been valuable to me in exploring directions for my own work. Autotheory finds many of its origins in feminist texts and is a practice that distinctly makes use of the philosophical and theoretical with an emphasis of the embodiment of lived experience manifested in art, writing, criticism, and boundless hybrid forms. 

I intend to present a multi-modal final project I hope to engage with more contemporary feminist texts across genre lines. I am interested in life-writing and how my own experience with feminist texts, poets, philosophers, artists, scholars, and all of the above (as many feminists working today take up and work across a multitude of monikers) informs my written and artistic experience. I have to agree where Rich writes that the possibilities between us are the most interesting things in life. The poems I paired with this proposal speak to that notion, though I find words often get buried in the slush. Striking visual imagery and curation is what stands out to me. Things that are tactile and made by the hand. I have worked in the past with intersections of text and art, and I plan to continue this work in honor of the feminist legacies of my past; citation as a form of relation, and as testament to the work still to be done. There is work to be done!

One of my favorite examples of text in contemporary art by Tracey Emin