Abstract
Ailbhe Smyth’s often poetic writing, as well as her re-scriptings and juxtapositioning of the texts of others, defy the linear logics of nationalist and liberal feminist narratives, moving instead between temporal and spatial standpoints to illustrate the complex (re)workings of patriarchal heteronormativity. She proclaims: “I am a bricoleuse, still” (2005: 394). Resisting “the rigid anxieties of academic discipline,” much of her writing is marked by “‘texturology’, rhythm and paroxysm” (ibid.). Transgressing the boundaries of genre and discipline, Smyth’s work both strategically reinscribes the two-gender dichotomy and deconstructs it via critical analysis of the gendering and heteronorming practices of state, media, religion, consumer, and popular culture. Another important aspect of her approach for me is the ways in which it keeps the emotional mediation of feminist thought and politics alive, eliciting in the reader contingent (dis)identifications, (mis)recognitions, and affective reactions. For example, in a piece where she examines the dynamics of sexuality and place, Smyth calls for attention, not just to concrete spaces and structures, but also to “the experiential spaces of affect, where identity and desire are variously and diversely formed and played out” (2005: 393).
Last week, it’s a verifiable fact,
I was planting polyanthus
A little late in the season
As ever
(Never quite making it into the first bunch of front runners)
Though they’llgrow much the same, in my experience,
And thinking—just associatively of course—
That of all the words with poly- at their root
Only one is for a flower
(Though my knowledge is strictly controlled by contingencies beyond my limits and univice versa)
Polymeric polynomial polyverse of polymorphous polytheist polyglots
Not grandiose solutions but particular negotiations located, limited, inescapably partial and always personally invested. Susan Bordo. Not dancing in frantic frenzy to the tuneless theories of disorder and deconstruction. Free, each one, to celebrate her own uncertainties in her own time and place.
Myriad overlapping stories always beginning originating in lived reality theory-in the-flesh politics in the bones.
—Polyvalent polygenesis (Smyth, 2005: 130/139; emphasis in original)
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© 2013 Noreen Giffney and Margrit Shildrick
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Gray, B. (2013). Affecting Trans-feminist Solidarity. In: Giffney, N., Shildrick, M. (eds) Theory on the Edge. Breaking Feminist Waves. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315472_7
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