Aaron Hammes, Case Western Reserve University
Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring 2024)

ABSTRACT: “Reterritorialize, Baby,” is an investigation of Torrey Peters’ recent novel, arguably the most popular novel written in the English language by and about a transgender person.  This inquiry breaks down the novel according to a new conception of minor literature, borrowing some of the basic structure of Deleuze and Guattari’s original design, while considering the specific ways in which trans minor literature challenges not only heteronormative conceptions of identity, epistemology, and labor, but also the ways in which each of these is built into the tradition of the Western novel in ways that reflect phobic public conceptions of family, community, progress, and work.  The article works through a series of deterritorializations and ultimately proposes that some of the work Detransition, Baby does is actually that of reterritorialization: remapping, extracting, and subsequently proposing new and disidentifying contexts and frames for subjects.  Whether these reterritorializations represent a “new frontier” for fiction or an alternative manner of subject formation and narrative construction, trans minor literature is at a tipping point, presenting some of the most varied and incisive literature being generated on this continent today.  This inquiry offers a hermeneutic for considering both one of its landmark works and its future prospects.

Laura Vrana, University of South Alabama
Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring 2024)

ABSTRACT: This article examines three contemporary poetry collections by Black women that center as their shared, vital topic the enslaved subjects of J. Marion Sims’s unethical nineteenth-century gynecological experiments: Dominique Christina’s Anarcha Speaks: A History in Poems (2018), Kwoya Fagin Maples’s Mend (2018), and Bettina Judd’s patient.: poems (2014). All three texts inhabit these historical figures through persona and deploy extremely formal experimental syntax and grammar. Drawing on Black feminist thinking about critical fabulation, historical revision, and poetics, this article argues that these works are effective, moral counter-monuments to these women not just in content but in formal architecture—because these poets use formal innovation to critique the biased, hegemonic institutions of medicine and history-writing and to urge readers to fight for reparative and reproductive justice.

Orian Zakai, George Washington University
Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring 2024)

ABSTRACT: This article charts a poetic conversation between three Hebrew women poets, Rachel Bluwstein, Yona Wallach and Sivan Beskin, surrounding the biblical figure of Jonathan, son of Saul. It traces the way in which the women poets reclaim and revise the figure of Jonathan against the grain of an androcentric intertextual tradition, in which the male-bond appears as a metonym of male superiority. The three poets’ shared fascination with Jonathan transposes the biblical intertext from the realm of male-exclusivity into a much more open field of meaning featuring gender-fluidity, pleasure, trauma and queer temporality. The article reads the poetic conversation surrounding the queer figure of Jonathan as a cross-generational collaborative endeavor of queer appropriation and reconstruction. Sustaining this collaboration is an intertextual network that spans beyond the three poets and the biblical text, encompassing a wide range of multilingual classic and modern cultural intertexts, through which various queer cultural contents interact with each other ultimately confounding national and heteronormative time and space.

Ann Catherine Hoag, University of Groningen
Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring 2024)

ABSTRACT: Critical examination of Beryl Markham’s 1942 West with the Night has tended to dismiss her aeronautical memoir as reifying a conservative outlook in its masculine and imperial positionings. Scholarly work on Markham’s text, however, has not fully examined the ways in which her writing contains transgressive depictions of flight that resist binary categorization: flying is neither wholly natural nor man-made, both ancient and of the future, both masculine and feminine. This resistance to clear taxonomies is mirrored in her depiction of a narrative “I” that counters unified determination. She creates an autobiographical subjectivity that is porous, fluid, and shifting with her use of a second person “you.” Engaging with theories of women’s autobiography reveals how Markham challenges the unity of what has functioned as the masculine “I” at the center of men’s autobiography, and complicates the “aeronautical ‘we’”, or the “flying pronoun” that permeates Lindbergh’s writing. Revisiting West with the Night with attention given to Markham’s subversion of oppositions and contesting of the traditional autobiographical subject makes visible the role new technologies can play in the strategies women’s memoirs engage to negotiate representations of selfhood.

Lang Wang, Beijing Institute of Technology
Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring 2024)

ABSTRACT: This paper examines filial piety, mother-daughter bonding, and romantic love in the short stories of Feng Yuanjun (1900-1974). I argue that filial piety and mother-daughter bonding are not always harmonious but rather are constructed antithetically, demonstrating the complexity of female kinship in Chinese women’s literature. Furthermore, maternal love is depicted as permanent and transcendent while romantic love is transient and happenstance. Mothers in Feng’s works are the moral force of the entire family and a source of love and support for their daughters, challenging the prevailing conception that Chinese mothers are merely agents of Confucian patriarchy. Overall, I assert that Feng Yuanjun’s works complement, revise, and undermine the male-centered anti-filial piety and anti-family discourse of the May Fourth movement, departing from the individualistic free love model.