Brigley, Z. (2008) Confessing the secrets of others: Pascale Petit's poetic employment of Latin American cultures and the Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo. Journal of International Women's Studies. 9(2), pp. 20-28. 1539-8706.
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Abstract:
This essay works to review the poetry of the Welsh-French writer Pascale Petit through the lens of recent theoretical scholarship relating to women, violence, and confession. More specifically, through a detailed analysis of two of her collections, The Zoo Father (2001) and The Wounded Deer (2005), I examine the ways in which Petit attempts to extricate confessional poetry from the stereotype of self-indulgent, ‘awful’ femininity outlined by Deryn Rees-Jones in Consorting with Angels (2005). It is my view that by recapitulating stories of women and violence in a variety of new contexts, Petit is able to reconfigure the politics of sexual violence, radically re- conceptualizing the traditional meaning of victimhood, the relationship between victims and perpetrators, and the stubbornly gendered notions of activity and passivity. This, I argue, is demonstrated most explicitly in the mythological poems of The Zoo Father, and in Petit’s poems about Frida Kahlo in The Wounded Deer. Locating the poetry of Petit alongside the painting of Frida Kahlo, I analyze the extent to which these artists are identified as ‘confessional’, and interrogate the validity, as well as the usefulness, of this problematic (and gendered) descriptor
Uncontrolled Keywords:
Frida Kahlo, art, poetry, Pascale Petit, confession, self-portrait
Subjects:
Creators:
Brigley, Z.
Publisher:
Bridgewater State University
Faculties, Divisions and Institutes:
Date:
March 2008
Date Type:
Publication
Page Range:
pp. 20-28
Journal or Publication Title:
Journal of International Women's Studies
Volume:
9
Number:
2
Language:
English
ISSN:
1539-8706
Status:
Published / Disseminated
Refereed:
Yes
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