<p>"We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves": The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996 addresses the questions of mothering and survival from a queer, diasporic literary perspective, arguing that the literary practices of Black feminists Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Alexis De Veaux and Barbara Smith enable a counternarrative to a neoliberal logic that criminalizes Black mothering and the survival of Black people outside and after their utility to capital. Treating Audre Lorde and June Jordan as primary theorists of mothering and survival, and Alexis De Veaux and Barbara Smith as key literary historical figures in the queer manifestation of Black feminist modes of literary production, this dissertation uses previously unavailable archival material, and queer of color critique and critical Black diasporic theoretical approaches to create an intergenerative reading practice. An intergenerative reading practice interrupts the social reproduction of meaning and value across time, and places untimely literary moments and products in poetic relationship to each other in order to reveal the possibility of another meaning of life. Ultimately this dissertation functions as a sample narrative towards the alternate meaning of life that the poetic breaks of Black feminist literary production in the queer spaces of counter-cultural markets, classrooms, autonomous publishing collectives make possible, concluding that mothering is indeed a reflexive and queer way of reading the present in the service of a substantively different future in which our outlawed love survives.</p> / Dissertation

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This paper discusses the poetry of Audre Lorde and Natasha Trethewey, and the ways in which they bring to attention the often-silenced histories of African American females. Through close readings of Lorde’s poems “Call” and “Coal,” and Trethewey’s “Three Photographs,” these histories are brought to the present with the framework of the words “call” and “re-call.” The paper explores the ways in which Lorde creates a new mythology for understanding her identity as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” in her innovative, intersectional feminist poetry. This is used as the framework for understanding modern poets like Trethewey, whose identity as a biracial black woman from the American South colors her lyric, more formal work. Lorde uses the vocal, oral tradition of calling as Trethewey relies on visual, gaze-focused recall. Recall is memory and re-call means bringing the hidden past into the future. The paper concludes by saying that all black female writers may participate in their own ways of calling out the truth and remembering what should be forgotten.

Studies of women’s experimental narrative in the twentieth century have often been fixed to political interests in the recovery of women’s artistic practices for inclusion in the canons of literary modernism and formal postmodernism. Concurrent trends in philosophy and critical theory, however, propose the interrogation of the limits of subjectivity itself, suggesting that the most provocative assertions about human experience eschew the very categorical delimitations, like gender, on which such recovery projects depend. This dissertation traces the literary investments of women, particularly queer women, whose experiments in life-writing reconfigure the boundaries of human subjects without relinquishing claims to the material or political conditions that shape their lives. “Rough Text” examines writing that queers or complicates autobiography by featuring self-referential protagonists whose lives illustrate the explosive consequences of both gender and genre manipulation. Writing themselves by unfastening themselves textually, temporally, and spatially, these authors do a liberating violence to their own coherence that shakes, and then rethinks, the grounds of their ontologies in ways that offer alternatives to the “psychological squalor” Fredric Jameson describes as the postmodern condition.

Studies of women’s experimental narrative in the twentieth century have often been fixed to political interests in the recovery of women’s artistic practices for inclusion in the canons of literary modernism and formal postmodernism. Concurrent trends in philosophy and critical theory, however, propose the interrogation of the limits of subjectivity itself, suggesting that the most provocative assertions about human experience eschew the very categorical delimitations, like gender, on which such recovery projects depend. This dissertation traces the literary investments of women, particularly queer women, whose experiments in life-writing reconfigure the boundaries of human subjects without relinquishing claims to the material or political conditions that shape their lives. “Rough Text” examines writing that queers or complicates autobiography by featuring self-referential protagonists whose lives illustrate the explosive consequences of both gender and genre manipulation. Writing themselves by unfastening themselves textually, temporally, and spatially, these authors do a liberating violence to their own coherence that shakes, and then rethinks, the grounds of their ontologies in ways that offer alternatives to the “psychological squalor” Fredric Jameson describes as the postmodern condition.

Em um mundo cada vez mais transnacional e multicultural, a identidade cultural é formada por meio de um processo constante de mobilidade e deslocamentos, resultando na formação de identidades culturais diaspóricas. Tais identidades culturais híbridas e heterogêneas se caracterizam por travessias de fronteiras e limitações impostas à construção da subjetividade. O presente estudo consiste em uma análise interpretativa de representações de identidades culturais diaspóricas em dois escritos autobiográficos ficcionais: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), de Gloria Anzaldúa e Zami A New Spelling of my Name, a biomythography (1982), de Audre Lorde. As representações de identidades culturais diaspóricas desenvolvidas em ambos os textos produzem efeitos que desestabilizam a política de representação da identidade cultural articulando identificações e desejos informados por hibridismo e diferença bem como reconstruindo a categoria da experiência e a produção do conhecimento através da ficcionalização da construção da identidade. O objetivo é investigar como as vozes narrativas projetam representações de identidades culturais diaspóricas simultaneamente resistentes e marginais em relação à cultura hegemônica. Tais representações são analisadas à luz do seguinte referencial teórico: a reconstrução da categoria da experiência de Joan Scott; a teoria dos conhecimentos situados de Donna Haraway; e uma estratégia crítica que propõe uma intersecção entre argumentos advindos do pensamento feminista e pós-moderno, que postulam a identidade como um constructo fluído, múltiplo, e instável, sustentada em The Politics of Postmodernism, de Linda Hutcheon; a coleção de ensaios editada por Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism; e The Postmodern Condition, de Jean-François Lyotard. O referencial teórico oferece uma perspectiva privilegiada para a investigação de representações de identidades culturais que questionam a concepção de identidade como fixa autônoma e anterior ao contexto sócio-histórico no qual a identidade e sua representação são formadas. / In an increasingly transnational and multicultural world, cultural identities are shaped through a constant process of mobility and displacements, resulting in the formation of diasporic cultural identities. These hybrid heterogeneous cultural identities are characterized by multiple crossings of borders and limitations imposed on the construction of a sense of subjectivity. The present study consists of an interpretative analysis of representations of diasporic cultural identities in two fictional autobiographical writings: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and Audre Lorde’s Zami A New Spelling of my Name, a biomythography (1982). The representations of diasporic cultural identities developed in both texts produce disruptive effects on the politics of representation of cultural identity by articulating identifications and desires informed by hybridity and difference as well as reconstructing the category of experience and the production of knowledge through the fictionalization of the construction of identity. The objective is to investigate how the narrative voices project representations of diasporic cultural identities simultaneously resistant and “marginal” to the hegemonic culture. These representations are analyzed under the following theoretical framework: Joan Scott’s reconceptualization of the category of experience; Donna Haraway’s theory of situated knowledges; and a critical strategy that proposes an intersection of arguments derived from feminist and postmodern thinking, which posit identity as a fluid, multiple, and unstable construct, supported on Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism; the collection of essays edited by Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism; and Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition. The theoretical framework provides a privileged perspective to investigate representations of cultural identity that question the conception of identity as fixed, autonomous, and prior to the social-historical context in which identity and its representation are shaped.

Em um mundo cada vez mais transnacional e multicultural, a identidade cultural é formada por meio de um processo constante de mobilidade e deslocamentos, resultando na formação de identidades culturais diaspóricas. Tais identidades culturais híbridas e heterogêneas se caracterizam por travessias de fronteiras e limitações impostas à construção da subjetividade. O presente estudo consiste em uma análise interpretativa de representações de identidades culturais diaspóricas em dois escritos autobiográficos ficcionais: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), de Gloria Anzaldúa e Zami A New Spelling of my Name, a biomythography (1982), de Audre Lorde. As representações de identidades culturais diaspóricas desenvolvidas em ambos os textos produzem efeitos que desestabilizam a política de representação da identidade cultural articulando identificações e desejos informados por hibridismo e diferença bem como reconstruindo a categoria da experiência e a produção do conhecimento através da ficcionalização da construção da identidade. O objetivo é investigar como as vozes narrativas projetam representações de identidades culturais diaspóricas simultaneamente resistentes e marginais em relação à cultura hegemônica. Tais representações são analisadas à luz do seguinte referencial teórico: a reconstrução da categoria da experiência de Joan Scott; a teoria dos conhecimentos situados de Donna Haraway; e uma estratégia crítica que propõe uma intersecção entre argumentos advindos do pensamento feminista e pós-moderno, que postulam a identidade como um constructo fluído, múltiplo, e instável, sustentada em The Politics of Postmodernism, de Linda Hutcheon; a coleção de ensaios editada por Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism; e The Postmodern Condition, de Jean-François Lyotard. O referencial teórico oferece uma perspectiva privilegiada para a investigação de representações de identidades culturais que questionam a concepção de identidade como fixa autônoma e anterior ao contexto sócio-histórico no qual a identidade e sua representação são formadas. / In an increasingly transnational and multicultural world, cultural identities are shaped through a constant process of mobility and displacements, resulting in the formation of diasporic cultural identities. These hybrid heterogeneous cultural identities are characterized by multiple crossings of borders and limitations imposed on the construction of a sense of subjectivity. The present study consists of an interpretative analysis of representations of diasporic cultural identities in two fictional autobiographical writings: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and Audre Lorde’s Zami A New Spelling of my Name, a biomythography (1982). The representations of diasporic cultural identities developed in both texts produce disruptive effects on the politics of representation of cultural identity by articulating identifications and desires informed by hybridity and difference as well as reconstructing the category of experience and the production of knowledge through the fictionalization of the construction of identity. The objective is to investigate how the narrative voices project representations of diasporic cultural identities simultaneously resistant and “marginal” to the hegemonic culture. These representations are analyzed under the following theoretical framework: Joan Scott’s reconceptualization of the category of experience; Donna Haraway’s theory of situated knowledges; and a critical strategy that proposes an intersection of arguments derived from feminist and postmodern thinking, which posit identity as a fluid, multiple, and unstable construct, supported on Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism; the collection of essays edited by Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism; and Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition. The theoretical framework provides a privileged perspective to investigate representations of cultural identity that question the conception of identity as fixed, autonomous, and prior to the social-historical context in which identity and its representation are shaped.

Em um mundo cada vez mais transnacional e multicultural, a identidade cultural é formada por meio de um processo constante de mobilidade e deslocamentos, resultando na formação de identidades culturais diaspóricas. Tais identidades culturais híbridas e heterogêneas se caracterizam por travessias de fronteiras e limitações impostas à construção da subjetividade. O presente estudo consiste em uma análise interpretativa de representações de identidades culturais diaspóricas em dois escritos autobiográficos ficcionais: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), de Gloria Anzaldúa e Zami A New Spelling of my Name, a biomythography (1982), de Audre Lorde. As representações de identidades culturais diaspóricas desenvolvidas em ambos os textos produzem efeitos que desestabilizam a política de representação da identidade cultural articulando identificações e desejos informados por hibridismo e diferença bem como reconstruindo a categoria da experiência e a produção do conhecimento através da ficcionalização da construção da identidade. O objetivo é investigar como as vozes narrativas projetam representações de identidades culturais diaspóricas simultaneamente resistentes e marginais em relação à cultura hegemônica. Tais representações são analisadas à luz do seguinte referencial teórico: a reconstrução da categoria da experiência de Joan Scott; a teoria dos conhecimentos situados de Donna Haraway; e uma estratégia crítica que propõe uma intersecção entre argumentos advindos do pensamento feminista e pós-moderno, que postulam a identidade como um constructo fluído, múltiplo, e instável, sustentada em The Politics of Postmodernism, de Linda Hutcheon; a coleção de ensaios editada por Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism; e The Postmodern Condition, de Jean-François Lyotard. O referencial teórico oferece uma perspectiva privilegiada para a investigação de representações de identidades culturais que questionam a concepção de identidade como fixa autônoma e anterior ao contexto sócio-histórico no qual a identidade e sua representação são formadas. / In an increasingly transnational and multicultural world, cultural identities are shaped through a constant process of mobility and displacements, resulting in the formation of diasporic cultural identities. These hybrid heterogeneous cultural identities are characterized by multiple crossings of borders and limitations imposed on the construction of a sense of subjectivity. The present study consists of an interpretative analysis of representations of diasporic cultural identities in two fictional autobiographical writings: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and Audre Lorde’s Zami A New Spelling of my Name, a biomythography (1982). The representations of diasporic cultural identities developed in both texts produce disruptive effects on the politics of representation of cultural identity by articulating identifications and desires informed by hybridity and difference as well as reconstructing the category of experience and the production of knowledge through the fictionalization of the construction of identity. The objective is to investigate how the narrative voices project representations of diasporic cultural identities simultaneously resistant and “marginal” to the hegemonic culture. These representations are analyzed under the following theoretical framework: Joan Scott’s reconceptualization of the category of experience; Donna Haraway’s theory of situated knowledges; and a critical strategy that proposes an intersection of arguments derived from feminist and postmodern thinking, which posit identity as a fluid, multiple, and unstable construct, supported on Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism; the collection of essays edited by Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism; and Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition. The theoretical framework provides a privileged perspective to investigate representations of cultural identity that question the conception of identity as fixed, autonomous, and prior to the social-historical context in which identity and its representation are shaped.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / For women in patriarchal societies, life is stitched with silence and violence. This is especially true for women of color. In a world that has cast women as invisible and voiceless, to create from the margins is to demand to be seen and heard. Thus, women’s art has never had the privilege of being art for art’s sake and instead is necessarily involved in the work of articulating and (re)writing female experience. When women seek, through their work and art, to feel deeply and connect with other women, they tap into what Audre Lorde has famously termed “the power of the erotic.” Lorde suggests that to acknowledge and trust those deepest feelings within our bodies is a subversive power that spurs social change. In the following work, novels by Kate Chopin, Gayl Jones, and Edwidge Danticat are linked by their female characters who seek the erotic via their art of choice and, in doing so, resist disempowerment and explore the life-giving nature of female connection. Furthermore, because the authors themselves are engaged in rendering the female experience visible, the novels discussed actively converse with their respective waves of feminism and propel social activism and feminist discourse. Hence, this project provides both a close reading of The Awakening, Corregidora, and The Dew Breaker, and a broader contention on the role of women’s literature in social justice.