Queer Lyric Embodiment

Chapter 2 continues the exploration of mutable lyric selfhood by focusing on queer lyric embodiment. Using notions like “female masculinity” (Halberstam), I look into genderqueer and transmasculine examples in Dickinson’s poems and letters and delineate how the unsettling power of Dickinson’s Shakespeare-inspired queer bodies extends beyond gender into other aspects of white heteronormative society such as class and race. I then turn to queer corporealities and queer embodiment, as well as patterns of transing*, of exceeding binary boundaries, and examine how they allow us to address questions of lyric excess.