It's at least arguable that the inscription of "femaleness" in a
register in which that range of experience had not previously figured
prominently is a de facto feminist gesture. An old one, by now, but
perhaps perennially necessary. There would be a kind of double
movement involved: first of all, writing "the female", and second of
all disrupting the idees fixes attached to "femaleness" through
writing.
In that case, though, the adoption of a particular formal register
would be a feminist gesture chiefly because of a historical antagonism
between prior workings of that form (presumably by un-"female"
writers) and feminist concerns: the game would be to co-opt and
subvert a manner of speaking by means of which one had formerly been
patronised and ignored. That isn't, yet, a positive identification of
feminist concerns with formal style - as a form of power-dressing,
say, or less frivolously as a mode of embodiment, a making-concrete of
ethical or intellectual rigour.
I sniff Kristeva in the background somewhere here, drawing parallels
between the rhythms of poetic language and the "pulsions" of
"semiosis". But I have some trouble with what looks to me like the
mischaracterisation of free verse as either clandestinely
fixed-metrical or simply un-metrical - of metre as a tennis-net that
must be either up or down. Celine's prose, a canonical example for
Kristeva of poetic language, is not written in fixed metre...
Dominic
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