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Anne Dalke's picture

in conscious rebellion

Intriguing thought, one that got me mulling...

& remembering the literary critic Elaine Showalter, decades ago,
differentiating between three phases of women's literature:

  • the "feminine" (when women writers adopted the standards of male culture),
  • the "feminist" (the phase of their conscious rebellion against those standards), and
  • the "female" (when they tried to establish their role/nature as genuine, viable, creative, independent, and different).
Then came the post-female phase, when policing that difference got tiring, seemed no longer productive....

Using those distinctions, I'd say I thought of my poem as "A 'Feminist' If" because I wrote it in conscious reaction to/as correction of a poem that seemed to me stridently masculine/male.

Hm...now what's the masculine-equivalent of "feminist"?
"Masculinist" seems to describe the affirmation, not the critique, of masculine ways of doing-and-being....

 

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