RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 Breaking Through the "Logic of Limits": Adrienne Rich and Radi¬ cal Complexity
A1 Yorke, Liz
AB Focusing on questions of identity, particularly lesbian identity, duringthe late seventies and early eighties, this essay explores the sequence“Twenty-One Love Poems” and notes the tension articulated within thepoetry between a dying identity politics, and the urgencies of an incomingpolitics of diversity. I seek to track, within these poems andothers of the period, the movement from consensus, in which Rich pursuesa politics of commonality, towards a much more inclusive politicsof radical complexity, in which she undertakes a wide-ranging enquiryinto the political construction and regulation of identity itself. Rich is,at this period, concerned to counter the erasures of lesbian existence,and to combat homophobic depictions of lesbian existence. She is alsoconcerned to celebrate transgressive erotic and sexual desires that workto unfix the economies and conventions of heterosexual logic. Rich’snotion of a lesbian continuum gives way under pressure, to a longing toembrace difference and diversity. She creates an inclusive politics capableof forging alliances between diverse groups of women, but, asthe poetry testifies, the contradictory other within the self must also beacknowledged and explored. This is the task of poem “XX”, in whichRich seems to ask: how can the category “lesbian” ever be representativeof any sort of unity. How can the lesbian “I” be predictable, stable,totalisable if there is always already substantial internal division?The developing politics of radical complexity must recognise alsothat “we come from many pasts: out of the left, out of the Ghetto, out ofthe Holocaust, out of the churches, out of marriages, out of the “gay”movement, out of the closet, out of the darker closet of long-term suf-focation of our love of women”. A poem that explores this radical complexityin detail is “Yom Kippur, 1984”. In this poem Rich begins toreconceptualise what constitutes “identity”. In a sense, “Yom Kippur,1984” points to a kind of necessary vigilance for the producer of art, tobe aware of what Diana Fuss has identified as “the difficult but urgenttextual work” of calling into question “the philosophical oppositionbetween ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ (which) like so many otherconventional binaries has always been constructed on the foundationsof another related opposition: the couple ‘inside’ and ‘outside’”. In thispoem, Rich creates a dialogue that explores this exclusive “logic oflimits”, and seeks to break down the related oppositions: margin/ centre;self/ other; inside/ outside; centre/ margin; solitude multitude; Arab/Jew; Jew/ gentile; Black or white; male or female; straight or queer;like oneself or stranger to the self. All these and more, need to be recognisedas simplistic modes of dichotomising of what is in reality complexand irreducible to any mere binary form.
PB Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de La Laguna
SN e-2530-8335
YR 1998
FD 1998
LK http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/30509
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DS Repositorio institucional de la Universidad de La Laguna
RD 18-sep-2024