Book contents
- The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Synchronic Histories of American Sexuality
- Part II Diachronic Histories of American Sexuality
- Part III Queer Methods
- How to Recognize the Queer Past before (and during) the Advent of Medicalization
- 39 Repression, Sublimation, and Latency from Charles Brockden Brown to James Purdy
- 40 Gender Variance before Trans
- 41 Female Friendship
- 42 The Medical Model and Early Gay and Lesbian Writing
- 43 “Flung out of space”
- 44 Quantifying Sex
- 45 The Pleasures of Reading Camp
- 46 The Queerness of Religion
- 47 Tracing Queer Crip Poetics in Time
- 48 Queer Print Culture
- Index
47 - Tracing Queer Crip Poetics in Time
from How to Recognize the Queer Past before (and during) the Advent of Medicalization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2024
- The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Synchronic Histories of American Sexuality
- Part II Diachronic Histories of American Sexuality
- Part III Queer Methods
- How to Recognize the Queer Past before (and during) the Advent of Medicalization
- 39 Repression, Sublimation, and Latency from Charles Brockden Brown to James Purdy
- 40 Gender Variance before Trans
- 41 Female Friendship
- 42 The Medical Model and Early Gay and Lesbian Writing
- 43 “Flung out of space”
- 44 Quantifying Sex
- 45 The Pleasures of Reading Camp
- 46 The Queerness of Religion
- 47 Tracing Queer Crip Poetics in Time
- 48 Queer Print Culture
- Index
Summary
This chapter proposes a queer-crip genealogy in American poetry stretching from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century to the present day. Through close readings of poems by twentieth-century poets Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde and twenty-first century poets Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Kay Ulanday Barrett, a queer disability poetics can be discerned and analyzed. This poetics is deeply concerned with identity, community, intersectionality, and resistance, and is characterized by themes of sexuality, witness, survival, and joy. Throughout this chapter, “crip poetics” is deployed not merely as a descriptor but as an analytic lens applied to poems that have been previously read primarily through understandings of disability as metaphor, alienation, or lack. Crip poetics instead reveals how disability can function as a source of connection, sustenance, and transformation in these poets’ work and in their worlds.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature , pp. 833 - 854Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024