Poetry Was There Between Us: Women's Erotic Literature as Sites of Resistance and Integrity

Poetry Was There Between Us: Women's Erotic Literature as Sites of Resistance and Integrity PDF Author: Anna Maria Esquivel
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ISBN:
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Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Erotic literature remains a blind spot in modern or contemporary literary criticism, even though sex and sexual identity is a widely accepted component of individual, social, and cultural identity. However, a careful investigation of erotic literature can provide valuable insight into how we constitute ourselves as subjects. Based on an understanding of the erotic and erotic literatures as sites of resistance, bonding, and belonging, I explore how the erotic--and consequently texts and ideology that privilege the erotic--remains a powerful site for negotiating power, constructing identity, and forming new intimacies. The primary modalities of the erotic are difference and interconnectedness. It is through this modality that erotic narratives critique the socio-historical violations and fissures of identity and subjectivity, yet simultaneously promote re-membering through the flows and processes of knowing and becoming, all while inhabiting integrity. Connecting these definitions of eroticism with the concept of "integral space" and the politics of integrity, I argue that eroticism and erotic literature map the processes by which subjects connect and bond through difference. Beginning with the ways in which erotic literature uses silences and absences in its texts, I explore the possibility of a prediscursive body paradoxically located in the language of erotic literature. While erotic theories explore the ways in which naming and speaking the deeply private, silent spaces of oppression, trauma, and abuse are powerful acts of resistance to cultural and social oppressions, works by Nikki Giovanni and Audre Lorde, as well as Kalamu ya Salaam and Etheridge Knight, suggest that silence, too, is a powerful force that leads to wholeness, healing, and connecting. Further, I investigate discursive and nondiscursive strategies in the erotic novel The Proof of the Honey by Salwa Al Neimi and Gayl Jones's Corregidora and how these literature employ body, voice, and metaphor as part of the erotic project. Each of these texts, I argue, reclaim the erotic space where individual subjectivities can meet each other, explore sexual boundaries, trangress those boundaries safely, and challenge the social, political, and historical limitations of identity.

Poetry Was There Between Us: Women's Erotic Literature as Sites of Resistance and Integrity

Poetry Was There Between Us: Women's Erotic Literature as Sites of Resistance and Integrity PDF Author: Anna Maria Esquivel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
Erotic literature remains a blind spot in modern or contemporary literary criticism, even though sex and sexual identity is a widely accepted component of individual, social, and cultural identity. However, a careful investigation of erotic literature can provide valuable insight into how we constitute ourselves as subjects. Based on an understanding of the erotic and erotic literatures as sites of resistance, bonding, and belonging, I explore how the erotic--and consequently texts and ideology that privilege the erotic--remains a powerful site for negotiating power, constructing identity, and forming new intimacies. The primary modalities of the erotic are difference and interconnectedness. It is through this modality that erotic narratives critique the socio-historical violations and fissures of identity and subjectivity, yet simultaneously promote re-membering through the flows and processes of knowing and becoming, all while inhabiting integrity. Connecting these definitions of eroticism with the concept of "integral space" and the politics of integrity, I argue that eroticism and erotic literature map the processes by which subjects connect and bond through difference. Beginning with the ways in which erotic literature uses silences and absences in its texts, I explore the possibility of a prediscursive body paradoxically located in the language of erotic literature. While erotic theories explore the ways in which naming and speaking the deeply private, silent spaces of oppression, trauma, and abuse are powerful acts of resistance to cultural and social oppressions, works by Nikki Giovanni and Audre Lorde, as well as Kalamu ya Salaam and Etheridge Knight, suggest that silence, too, is a powerful force that leads to wholeness, healing, and connecting. Further, I investigate discursive and nondiscursive strategies in the erotic novel The Proof of the Honey by Salwa Al Neimi and Gayl Jones's Corregidora and how these literature employ body, voice, and metaphor as part of the erotic project. Each of these texts, I argue, reclaim the erotic space where individual subjectivities can meet each other, explore sexual boundaries, trangress those boundaries safely, and challenge the social, political, and historical limitations of identity.

The Advocate

The Advocate PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
The Advocate is a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) monthly newsmagazine. Established in 1967, it is the oldest continuing LGBT publication in the United States.

Excavating the Sky

Excavating the Sky PDF Author: Konstantin Kulakov
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692466360
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
In his debut collection of poems, Excavating the Sky, Konstantin Kulakov labors to relate the inner spirituality of his Russian background to the fragmentation of a market-driven New World. Whether it is his failed Muslim-Christian relationship, his dance with natural science, or his struggle to expose continued US raciality, Kulakov seeks the contradictions in everything, "mixing words to bring-out sparks." What emerges is a spiritual language that resists the exclusionary tendencies of the 21st century and offers subtle flashes of possibility.

All About Love

All About Love PDF Author: bell hooks
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062862170
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
A New York Times bestseller and enduring classic, All About Love is the acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' "Love Song to the Nation" trilogy. All About Love reveals what causes a polarized society, and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces. “The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness--not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love. As bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question “What is love?” her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the “100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life.” All About Love is a powerful, timely affirmation of just how profoundly her revelations can change hearts and minds for the better.

Flash Count Diary

Flash Count Diary PDF Author: Darcey Steinke
Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
ISBN: 0374716161
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
“Many days I believe menopause is the new (if long overdue) frontier for the most compelling and necessary philosophy; Darcey Steinke is already there, blazing the way. This elegant, wise, fascinating, deeply moving book is an instant classic. I’m about to buy it for everyone I know.” —Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts A brave, brilliant, and unprecedented examination of menopause Menopause hit Darcey Steinke hard. First came hot flashes. Then insomnia. Then depression. As she struggled to express what was happening to her, she came up against a culture of silence. Throughout history, the natural physical transition of menopause has been viewed as something to deny, fear, and eradicate. Menstruation signals fertility and life, and childbirth is revered as the ultimate expression of womanhood. Menopause is seen as a harbinger of death. Some books Steinke found promoted hormone replacement therapy. Others encouraged acceptance. But Steinke longed to understand menopause in a more complex, spiritual, and intellectually engaged way. In Flash Count Diary, Steinke writes frankly about aspects of Menopause that have rarely been written about before. She explores the changing gender landscape that comes with reduced hormone levels, and lays bare the transformation of female desire and the realities of prejudice against older women. Weaving together her personal story with philosophy, science, art, and literature, Steinke reveals that in the seventeenth century, women who had hot flashes in front of others could be accused of being witches; that the model for Duchamp's famous Étant donnés was a post-reproductive woman; and that killer whales—one of the only other species on earth to undergo menopause—live long post-reproductive lives. Flash Count Diary, with its deep research, open play of ideas, and reverence for the female body, will change the way you think about menopause. It's a deeply feminist book—honest about the intimations of mortality that menopause brings while also arguing for the ascendancy, beauty, and power of the post-reproductive years.

Your Healing is Killing Me

Your Healing is Killing Me PDF Author: Virginia Grise
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780991418398
Category : DRAMA
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Your Healing is Killing Me is a performance manifesto based on lessons learned in San Antonio free health clinics and New York acupuncture schools; from the treatments and consejos of curanderas, abortion doctors, Marxist artists, community health workers, and bourgie dermatologists. One artist's reflections on living with post-traumatic stress disorder, ansia, and eczema in the new age of trigger warnings, the master cleanse, and crowd-funded self-care.

The Sense of an Ending

The Sense of an Ending PDF Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307957330
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

Spill

Spill PDF Author: Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822373572
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 77

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Book Description
In Spill, self-described queer Black troublemaker and Black feminist love evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs presents a commanding collection of scenes depicting fugitive Black women and girls seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism. In this poetic work inspired by Hortense Spillers, Gumbs offers an alternative approach to Black feminist literary criticism, historiography, and the interactive practice of relating to the words of Black feminist thinkers. Gumbs not only speaks to the spiritual, bodily, and otherworldly experience of Black women but also allows readers to imagine new possibilities for poetry as a portal for understanding and deepening feminist theory.

Sister Outsider

Sister Outsider PDF Author: Audre Lorde
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143134442
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
“Sister Outsider, a collection of essays and speeches by the pioneering feminist Audre Lorde, is one of my all-time-favorite books. It’s always great to have an intersectional tome on hand.” —Amanda Gorman "Sister Outsider's teachings, by one of our most revered elder stateswomen, should be read by everyone." —Essence Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature, with a foreword by Mahogany L. Browne. A New York Times New & Noteworthy book A Penguin Vitae Edition In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. The groundbreaking feminist's timely collection of nonfiction writings on race, gender, and LGBTQ issues is now for the first time in Penguin Classics as part of the Penguin Vitae series, with a foreword by poet Mahogany L. Browne. Penguin Classics launches a new hardcover series with five American classics that are relevant and timeless in their power, and part of a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from almost seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.

Beat Feminisms

Beat Feminisms PDF Author: Polina Mackay
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000509885
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
This is the first book-length study to read women of the Beat Generation as feminist writers. The book focuses on one author from each of the three generations that comprise the groups of female writers associated with the Beats – Diane di Prima, ruth weiss and Anne Waldman – as well as on experimental and multimedia artists, such as Laurie Anderson and Kathy Acker, who have not been read through the prism of Beat feminism before. This book argues that these writers’ feminism evolved over time but persistently focussed on intertextuality, transformation, revisionism, gender, interventionist poetics and activism. It demonstrates how these Beat feminisms counteract the ways in which women have been undermined, possessed or silenced.