Gender, Sexuality, and Culture

The focus of this seminar is the cultural topos of the land as woman and its rearticulations in diverse poetic traditions. Taking our investigation beyond the generalized association of earth with woman, we will start with the foundational biblical metaphor of Zion — the city, nation, or land — as woman or wife; and of God, speaking through the (male) prophet-poet, as lover or husband.  The most familiar extension of this metaphor in the Prophets maps a woman’s deviation from patriarchal sexual norms such as modesty and fidelity onto the nation’s deviation from the norms of biblical monotheism, figuring the unfaithful wife/city as a whore that must be punished. We will explore the consequences of this metaphorical system for the history of poetry in the west, where normative poetic address involves a masculine lyrical “I” who is modeled on the biblical prophet, and through him metonymically on God; and where the feminized city, land or nation are typically the addressee, the recipients of inspired poetic message. At the center of our investigation will be the question: If writing the land/nation has been modeled on heterosexual love, if poetic agency has always been male and the nation only figuratively female, what has that meant both for the possibility of a female poetic voice and for the construction of woman as a (literal) national subject? How has the feminized land served the poetic discourses of nationalism and colonization? Most importantly, what happens when women poets appropriate the topos and speak as (homoerotic) lover/spouse of the land or nation?

The course will combine linguistically and historically informed close readings of poetry in the participants’ different languages of specialization with a discussion of feminist and postcolonial accounts of the land and the nation’s association with the female body.

Course Reader: (available 1st week of classes at Instant Copying and Laser Printing, 2015 Shattuck). Readings include selections from Annette Kolodny’s classic The Lay of the Land, as well as from Susan Aiken, Making Worlds: Gender, Metaphor, Materiality, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Timothy Beal and David Gunn, Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies, Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, Writing Women and Space, Caren Kaplan et al, Between Woman and Nation, George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, Stephen Moore, God’s Beauty Parlor and Other Queer Spaces in and Around the Bible, Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Andrew Parker et al, Nationalism and Sexualities, Susan Merrill Squier, Women Writers and the City, Nelly Stienstra, YHWH is the Husband of His People, Helen Weinreich-Haste, The Sexual Metaphor, and others.

Requirements: 1 in-class presentation and 1 seminar paper. Collaborative projects will be encouraged.