Date of Award

6-2019

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Organizational Unit

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, English and Literary Arts

First Advisor

Selah Saterstrom

Keywords

Creative writing, Poetry

Abstract

Over, Then Over Again, Over applies aesthetics of cuteness and girly kitsch to critique the essentialist identities of patriarchal and ableist systems. The project engages, through scholarly, poetic, and asemic writings, identities as contingent, performed acts and embodied, lived experiences. In a master narrative that characterizes disordered subjects as morally impure, while insisting upon femininity as safeguarding physical purity, the most ineffable identity might be “the madwoman.” Both rejected and romanticized, her diagnosis results from an inability to be contained—she exists in excess—and her pathologization renders self-expression too illogical to be legitimate. At the same time, she lives in a perpetual state of girlhood, not as a developmental stage, but as an imposed social persona. Situated at the nexus of feminist theory and disability poetics, this project examines storytelling modes like the pathography, confessional lyric, and fairy tale as sites of ongoing identity reformation in conversation with rape culture as the violence inherent to fetishizing purity. Expanding what constitutes a text, this work includes textiles as communicative sites that redefine the sentence as a narrative vehicle. This project enacts medical, poetic, and tactilic repetitions on the surface of the text/ile to reframe disorder as encoding the body’s many languages. In this poetics, disorder, rather than a diagnostic label necessitating a linear process of recovery, functions outside of explanatory and evaluative notions of legibility, serving instead as a means of active and potentially empowering expression.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. This work may only be accessed by members of the University of Denver community. The work is provided by permission of the author for individual research purposes only and may not be further copied or distributed. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Jessica Comola

Provenance

Received from author

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

246 pgs

Discipline

Creative writing

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