Abstract
This essay reads Edith Södergran’s poetic subject in Dikter (Poems) (1916) as multiple and, in their complex negotiation and revision of the cultural body assigned female at birth, representative of a gender expansiveness that we can identify today as trans and genderqueer. These queer readings of Södergran’s poems seek to move away from traditional interpretations of her work while resisting the application of fixed meanings onto them. Locating potential manifestations, opposed to identifications, of trans expression can open up new possibilities for understanding the complexity of Södergran’s writing and how contemporary readers can consider their own positionality as they navigate and renegotiate their place in the queer worlds Södergran built. This essay argues that Edith Södergran’s avant-gardist world-building of materially and aesthetically genderqueer poetic subjects contributes to her own revolutionary brand of Finland-Swedish modernism.
Highlights
This essay reads Edith Södergran’s poetic subject in Dikter (Poems) (1916) as multiple and, in their complex negotiation and revision of the cultural body assigned female at birth, representative of a gender expansiveness that we can identify today as trans and genderqueer
Södergran’s avant-gardist world-building of materially and aesthetically genderqueer poetic subjects contributes to her own revolutionary brand of Finland-Swedish modernism
This essay instead argues that Edith Södergran’s avant-gardist world-building of materially and aesthetically genderqueer poetic subjects contributes to her own revolutionary brand of Finland-Swedish modernism
Summary
Södergran’s production of autonomous female subjectivity has inspired powerful readings of gender in her writing. Södergran’s poetic voices effect genderqueer subjects who are radical, conventional, avant-gardist, emancipated, and oppressed As much as they transcend various binary axes, they sometimes subscribe to them, ironically or not. The poem shows that we, too, might regard pronouns and their cultural attachments to be so natural that the threat of relinquishing them produces a sorg (sorrow) so disorientating that we demand submission or expulsion In her ironic reproduction of the processes by which language and discursive hegemonic femininity shape the body, Södergran effects a method for queer “unfailure” to reproduce norms ostensibly intact. Considering the possibilities of trans becoming in Södergran’s writing, the implication may be that the speaker was to use present vocabulary, assigned female at birth; yet hegemonic norms, including the anticipated appearance of the female-presenting body, that interpellate Woman as a culturally intelligible subject are detrimental to the nonconforming body. The poetic subject surprises the reader twice: first by invoking the image of the beautiful crumbling woman and by revealing her desire to decompose
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
