Between noon and 1:15 p.m. on Thursday, January 4, 2018, I will be speaking about Alice Notley as part of the panel “Precariousness and Women’s Bodies” at the Modern Language Association convention, “#States of Insecurity,” in the Union Square Room of the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel, 811 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10019.
Given the problem of violence against women, what type of politics has the potential to address this issue? I probe the tension between feminism and the dreams of classlessness that circulated through Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses (1998). Women associated with the New York School often felt compelled to defy the masculinist queer bohemia that their male counterparts thrived within. Too often in the various nonbiological family configuration that Notley observes, responsibilities for domestic chores and childcare fell to women. Such circumstances lead Notley’s speaker to desire a more egalitarian distribution of responsibility across the sex divide, perhaps even in the unexpected form of the heteronormative nuclear family’s explicit division of labor wherein men worked as breadwinners while women tended home and children.
The dichotomies through which Notley organizes her resistance shift according to the current needs of her self-definition. So while she exposes the sexism often inherent in queer or sexually unconventional bohemias, she also fights a similar chauvinism in its more heteronormative instantiations. And when she does so, to render herself outside of the heteronormative expectations she critiques, Notley positions herself as an artistic, headstrong feminist who would belong to the sexually libertine communities she scoffs at elsewhere. Notley always condemns from the other side (the outside), and it is she who gets to call what the sides are and who is included on each side of the fighting line. A reconsideration of the interactions among the intersections of class and sexual mores circulating through the artistic communities depicted in Notley’s poetry is crucial to comprehending her often contradictory critiques.
