Theorizing the Body

Abstract

Despite, or perhaps because of, disciplining agencies’ insistence on the containment, restraint, and management of the body, the body emerges as a crucial element in the work of many women poets. Edna St. Vincent Milky, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Chin, and Marilyn Hacker, each in their own way, refuse to idealize, sanitize, or contain the body. Instead, each of these poets writes about, on, or through the body, thus rendering it both a poetic subject and object. Millay’s, Bishop’s, Chin’s, and Hacker’s poetic bodies circulate in registers of desire, creativity, intellectuality, spirituality, and sexuality, and these poets give us female, male, whole, shattered, distorted, small, large, visible, invisible, desiring, desired, strong, weak, ailing, and dead bodies. These poetic bodies attest to the body’s often contentious position in relation to gender, sexuality, race, and class. Even the seemingly decorous poetic body flaunts conventional boundaries as each woman utilizes the trope of the body or the body as trope to investigate constructions of self, knowledge, language, and poetry.KeywordsWestern PhilosophyBody PoliticFeminist DebateMaterial ExistenceBiological DeterminismThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.