The Faceless And The Unborn: On Queer and Jewish Futures in the Works of Muriel Rukeyser

Project Details

Description

This research examines the function of Jewish and queer identity in the texts of Muriel Rukeyser as an ethics and politics of relations to the self, the other, the past and the future. Chapter 1 will examine Rukeyser’s navigation of Jewish myth and queer aesthetics in her long poem ‘Akiba’ as a form of gynocentric writing which refuses dualistic conceptions of gender and as a form of Jewish writing concerned with Jewish identity as a mandate for intersectional political responsibility. Following from this, Chapter 2 will examine how Rukeyser navigates gynocentrism in relation to an anti-binaristic conception of gender by reading the representation of childbirth as a female creative act in her ‘Orpheus’ sequence. Rukeyser’s sense of identity is not to do with the undiminishing self-sameness or individual uniqueness of what is named. Her sense of identity responds to a retroactive temporality concerned with a transformable self and a relational ontology concerned with an interconnected self. Chapter 3 of this research will return to the question of identity by examining the trope of masks in Rukeyser’s work as a synthesis of the philosophical approaches of feminist inquiry and Kwakwaka’wakw rituals. Rukeyser’s poetic presents a critique of identity in which the meaning of the self is not already given in itself but must be made by identifying relations outside the self. But Rukeyser also provides an idiosyncratic ethics of thinking those relations which is firmly rooted in the need to claim one’s own identity. This essay will attempt to demonstrate how Rukeyser’s ethical approach to the problem of identity continues to make her texts a valuable tool in articulating queer and Jewish futures.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date1/09/2222/02/24

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