ABSTRACT
Despite long-term activism among feminist and queer communities, non-normative gender identities and sexualities remain marginalised and stigmatised in mainstream US culture. This chapter explores the potential for feminist experimental poetry to deconstruct heteronormative discourses around gender and sexuality on formal and thematic levels, using US poet Dodie Bellamy’s cut-up method and aesthetic in Cunt-Ups (2001)as a case study. While the intersections between feminist politics and cut-up techniques are historically overlooked in the context of poetry, I contend that cut-up methods are ripe for feminist analysis when used by poets such as Bellamy. Bellamy’s process of cutting up and recombining multiple texts (and voices) affects the stability of the speaking subject, resisting heteronormative narratives of gender and sexuality as immutable by producing sentences that constantly fragment, merge, and contort perspectives and bodies into new queer forms. By analysing the material arrangement of text, I demonstrate how Bellamy’s subversive use of form encourages readers to move beyond Western assumptions of cis-heterosexuality as a fixed position and the norm from which all other gender and sexual identities deviate.
