"""A house of difference"": Constructions of the lesbian poet in Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Paula Gunn Allen"
In my negotiations with the genre of poetry and in particular with lesbian poets, I propose that the genre offers a house for lesbian identity which constructs itself through materials both literary and extra-literary--materials peculiar to lesbians yet variously available in the cultural imagination; poetry is indeed a space both utopic and real. Inasmuch as the label of 'poet' performs a loaded function in the literate high culture of literary discourse, it is also a curiously slippery designation which often undermines its own privileged status. Lesbian poets are at once women who perform lyric identity to grass-roots audiences, and writers whose signatures need institutional recognition. They play to both an audience's need for affective identification and the academic reader's call for textual complexity. But, though deeply invested in their overlapping roles as activists and lesbians, the poets I read--Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Paula Gunn Allen--are accorded very different literary status. In examining the processes, literary and cultural, that place them as poets, my dissertation contends that literary recognition, whether from feminist critics or others, necessarily foregrounds literary criteria over the poets' activist agendas. In acceding to norms of literary worth, recuperations of alterative poets paradoxically perpetuate and justify the disciplinary constraints of the literary as a system.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign