Chapter 16 - Feminist Poetries of the Open Wound

Summary

Carr studies a diverse and intergenerational group of twenty-first-century feminist poets: Serena Chopra (US), Khadijah Queen (US), Aditi Machado (US/India), Lisa Robertson (Canada/France), and Nat Raha (UK), each of whom address patriarchal violence in their poems. While the articulation of the wounded woman’s body is a central project of contemporary feminism (as it has been of prior feminisms), as evidenced by the #MeToo movement, so too is the corresponding and equally dynamic celebration and display of women’s bodies as sources and sites of pleasure. In so far as patriarchy’s violence is often aimed at women’s bodies’ capacity for pleasure and desire, the expression of such pleasure becomes a form of resistance. Therefore, as much as the poems Carr reads air the wounds of patriarchy, they also explore the eroticthought of very broadly as that which draws us towards one another, as that which motivates the permeation of boundaries, and as that which emphasises the vulnerability of people in relationas a response to such wounds.