Lesbian Poetics

Abstract

Inspired by women’s emotional and sexual desires, lesbian poetics offers a passionate and lyrical tradition of prose, poetry, experimental literatures, and critical analysis that both celebrate women’s relationships to women and consider the patriarchal, heteronormative pressures that have silenced lesbian art and expression in dominant cultures. As an aesthetics addressed to women by women, lesbian poetics combines art and politics as an aesthetic practice that expresses fervor, devotion, passion, resentment, and a sense of pushing back against oppressive institutions. Emerging during the second wave of feminist activism in the 1960s and 1970s, the work of such writers as Rita Mae Brown, Monique Wittig, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Nicole Brossard, Judy Grahn, Dionne Brand, Olga Broumas and others linked a specifically lesbian aesthetics of cultural critique simultaneously to the investments of the women’s movement and to a more overt declaration of the presence and power of lesbian desire. Inheriting a tradition of modernist lesbian expression from such writers as Natalie Barney, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Djuna Barnes, Radclyffe Hall, and Violette Leduc, the lesbian writers from the latter part of the twentieth century more openly celebrated a specifically lesbian set of aesthetic and cultural concerns, extolling lesbian existence and developing modes of narrative, poetics, and criticism that combined lyricism, a consciousness of struggle, and an expansion of the possibilities of literary forms as a means for proclaiming lesbian intensity and liberation. Ever mindful of both the women’s community and the pleasures of broad connection, lesbian poetics avoided iterating the limiting binaries that sustained heteronormative ways of thinking, offering instead multiplicity, diversity, and a variety of new ways of thinking and expressing the ardent, erotic, and communal relations among women.