ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between poetry and gender, asking not only what centring questions of gender can tell us about different poetic works and practices, but how poetry can be used to rethink gender itself—its norms, behaviours, embodiments, and representations. Through the particular lens of experimental poetry and femininity in contemporary Japan—the instructional poems of Yoko Ono, the body-focused poems of Itō Hiromi, Minashita Kiriu’s poetic explorations of technology and identity, and ni_ka’s innovative online “monitor poems” and “augmented reality poems”—I examine how the reading and writing of poetry can complicate simplistic categories like “woman poet,” or even “woman,” by stretching and surpassing the limits of how language and media construct gender and sexuality.
