Sappho

Alterity, Misogyny & the Agonistic Feminine

Joan Retallack
Hieronymus Bosch, 'Garden of Earthly Delights' (detail).
Above: Hieronymus Bosch, 'Garden of Earthly Delights' (detail), via Wikimedia Commons.

This essay is conjectural and conversational. Conversational with other texts, other minds; but also among the importantly divergent logics of poetry and discourse, discourse and exploratory essay. Decades ago, skeptical about the force of a strictly woman-centered feminist theory whose reactive stance seemed to corroborate the secondary status of the feminine in the age-old M/F binary, I was struck by the realization of a gender and genre transgressive experimental feminine rooted in embodied female experience but integral to all struggles with the cultural coercions of an ubermasculine hegemony.

 

Antigone: I stand convicted of impiety,
the evidence, my pious duty done …
Chorus: The same tempest of mind
as ever, controls the girl.[1]

Despite the fact that gender identities are in increasingly complex conversation with biology and cultural construction the reductive force of patriarchy, with its sidekick misogyny, remains the catastrophic constant. — S. M. Quant[2]

February 6, 2018

Geomantic riposte: 'Undark'

Garry Thomas Morse

Sandy Pool hails from Erin, Ontario and is a holder of the prestigious Killam scholarship in poetics at the University of Calgary. Her first book Exploding Into Night was short-listed for the 2010 Governor General’s Award for poetry and Undark: An Oratorio was short-listed for an Alberta Book Award for Poetry and the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Pool’s impressive background in many areas of theatre performance, creative writing, and libretto crafting lend a Euripidean sensibility and dramatic force to the latter marvel.

Syndicate content