Masters Thesis

Breaking Binaries in Postmodern Poetry: Gender Identities in Prelude to Bruise, [Insert Boy], I Am Not Your Final Girl, and Femme in Public

Bodies have often been assigned one of two genders—male or female. When individuals disrupt this binary code, they are often met by violence. Women have long been considered the sole victims of gender violence, but there is now ample evidence of violence against non-conforming males and transgender and nonbinary individuals. This thesis addresses four postmodern collections of poetry that explore gender oppression, such as rape, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and intimate partner violence, across all genders: Danez Smith’s [Insert Boy] (2014), Saeed Jones’s Prelude to Bruise (2015), Alok Vaid-Menon’s Femme in Public (2017), and Claire C. Holland’s I Am Not Your Final Girl (2018). The consequences of gender violence can be traced throughout all four collections; I will primarily be addressing the collections’ focus on assault, possession, destruction, and transformation. In exploring this violence, the poets grapple with definitions of gender and sexuality and other intersections of oppression. To better understand the relationships between different genders and the connection between identity and agency between varying intersections of oppression, I incorporate and interact with the theory of various voices in gender studies, including Judith Butler, Susan Bordo, and Michel Foucault.

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