Seeing Words, Hearing Voices: Hannah Weiner, Dora García, and the Poetic Performance of Radical Dis/Humanism

Abstract

Hannah Weiner’s performance of Clairvoyant Journal on Public Access Poetry and Dora García’s Hearing Voices Café question normative linguistic performance and the boundaries of individual subjectivity. Both Weiner and García stage linguistic disruptions of the clean separations between inside and outside, sanity and insanity, rationality and irrationality, and singularity and plurality that regulate normative mental and aesthetic embodiments. McEwan reads Weiner and García’s work as critiques of the liberal humanist subject. Weiner and García’s poetic performances create a radical dis/humanism through public, interruptive multiplicities instantiated by non-normative mental experience and socially stigmatized mental disability. Radical dis/humanism arises from the performance of a non-binary dis/humanism within a humanist framework that disrupts institutional stasis and demands a redefinition of relations from an outsider and avant-garde perspective.