Negotiating boundaries : the economics of space and gender in Mina Loy’s early poems

Abstract

Since the beginning of her career in the early teens of the twentieth century, the British born poet Mina Loy was concerned with rethinking, redefining, and often rejecting, traditional ideas about gender identity. The poet’s concern developed out of her personal and aesthetic dialogue with contemporary artistic and cultural phenomena, such as Italian Futurism, Gertrude Stein’s experimental prose, Pound’s modernism and Surrealist poetics, with which she came into contact during the years spent in Paris (1900-1907), in Florence (19071916), and after she moved to New York in 1916. In Loy’s early poetry the reflection on gender is inextricably linked with the exploration of the aesthetic and epistemological possibilities of language as well as with the creation of new poetic forms, which were to influence and inspire numerous American early modernist poets. Loy’s interest for questions of gender identity did not stem just from her involvement with first wave American feminism, as Linda A. Kinnahan suggests 1 , but was also the result of her observation and refusal of the restriction of gender roles both in the middle class conservative social environment in which she grew up, as well as in the bohemian and wealthy expatriate circles that she frequented across Europe. Moreover, it was related to her contact with the Futurists and the debate internal to the movement on the role of women in the group and in society. Marriage, sexual freedom, sexuality, gender identity, prostitution and procreation were some of the themes that the swashbuckling Futurist manifestoes and works openly confronted as part of their project of