&NOW 2018

This panel will explore a feminist poetics that articulates pleasure, desire, and dynamic attachment in response to the psychic and bodily wounds imposed by patriarchal violence. Given that this violence is often aimed at the body’s capacity for pleasure and desire, we will look at work that explores eros, vulnerability, and relationality to mark these wounds rather than conceal or heal them, to, as Rosi Braidotti has said, explore desire as fundamental in the “feminist politics of pursuing alternative definitions of female subjectivity.” In addition to looking at ways certain works of prose, poetry, and cross-genre work in translation aim to trouble liberal virtues of individualism, self-interest, and what Judith Butler has called “the masculinist fantasies of sovereign mastery,” we will ask larger questions like, what are different ways to articulate the “female” body, what is the “female” body, and how to perform the body in all of its various particularities, its languaged, cultural, and social iterations. With the aim of challenging hierarchical arrangements of public/private, self/other, production/reproduction, and pleasure/pain, we hope to explore virtues of eros playing a primary role in meaning-making, subject-formation, and the making of the poem and social/poetic self.