Fantasy under Duress: Connie Scozzaro’s &lt;i&gt;Contrapposto Action Queen&lt;/i&gt;

Edward Luker

doi:10.16995/biip.10

Abstract

This article explores how Connie Scozzaro’s Contrapposto Action Queen (2013) repeatedly takes up two mystifications of femininity from classical mythology, Venus and Lamia, so as to subject them to critique. It takes the images of Venus and Lamia from the writing of two poets, Charles Algernon Swinburne and John Keats. These examples are shown to be epitomes of male poetic fantasy. Within Scozzaro’s collection these fantasies are dissected, undermined, or taken apart through exaggeration, ironization, and the use of tone. The book makes explicit that within patriarchal society, male fantasies are part of a social condition of gendered violence. Contra Brandon Brown’s argument that Contrapposto Action Queen articulates the dialectic of the possible and the actual, this article articulates that for Scozzaro the possible is always conditioned by fantasy. It finishes by looking at Theodor Adorno’s essay ‘Lyric Poetry and Society’. Where Adorno states the lyric subject manifests itself with masculine ‘unrestrained individuation’, this fails to grasp how the lyric poem can utilize strategies of concealment to stress the consequences of the lyric subject’s gendering.

Highlights

Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service
Contra Brandon Brown’s argument that Contrapposto Action Queen articulates the dialectic of the possible and the actual, this article articulates that for Scozzaro the possible is always conditioned by fantasy
Where Adorno states the lyric subject manifests itself with masculine ‘unrestrained individuation’, this fails to grasp how the lyric poem can utilize strategies of concealment to stress the consequences of the lyric subject’s gendering

Summary

Edward Luker

This article explores how Connie Scozzaro’s Contrapposto Action Queen (2013) repeatedly takes up two mystifications of femininity from classical mythology, Venus and Lamia, so as to subject them to critique. It takes the images of Venus and Lamia from the writing of two poets, Charles Algernon Swinburne and John Keats. Contra Brandon Brown’s argument that Contrapposto Action Queen articulates the dialectic of the possible and the actual, this article articulates that for Scozzaro the possible is always conditioned by fantasy It finishes by looking at Theodor Adorno’s essay ‘Lyric Poetry and Society’. Where Adorno states the lyric subject manifests itself with masculine ‘unrestrained individuation’, this fails to grasp how the lyric poem can utilize strategies of concealment to stress the consequences of the lyric subject’s gendering

To hell with the category

Venus and Lamia in the male imagination

Veneration and demonization

Contrapposto is not the friend of action

Lyric Poetry and Concealment