Queer Gendering in Adrienne Rich's Selected Poems

Abstract

Adrienne Rich is one of the most famous American feminist poets in the modern world. She stated that women are gendered in the patriarchal society to be inferiors, victims and weak. In Rich's poems proposes that re-gendering discourse will help women to prove their own female identities away from the patriarchal heterosexual discourse which oppressed women along history. Being a feminist activist, she ultimately deals with the female issues, but her method of dealing is not the usual attack on males; her emphasis is on creation of females’ own community for the consolidation of their strength. While doing so, she supports lesbianism, which is the strategy to downplay the importance of men for women. Advocating a lesbian relationship among women, she challenges the notion of heterosexuality as a natural biological phenomenon. What is called natural is in fact constructed, and heterosexuality is also constructed by males for their pleasure. Thus, to challenge this masculine opportunism, she celebrates love among women.