The Gurlesque is a term coined by Arielle Greenberg who, together with Lara Glenum, brought together what they acknowledged as Gurlesque poems in their recent anthology where they propose the rise of a new tendency in contemporary avant-garde poetry by women. They define the Gurlesque as “an emerging field of female artists now in their 20s, 30s and early 40s who, taking a page form the burlesque, perform their femininity in a campy or overtly mocking way. Their work assaults the norms of acceptable female behavior by irreverently deploying gender stereotypes to subversive ends” (Glenum and Greenberg 11). Based on this definition, I concluded that the anthology identifies the Gurlesque with three key elements: femininity, performativity, and the aesthetics of the distasteful.
Before moving onto the details of each element, it is important to note that for a poem to qualify as Gurlesque, all three elements must coexist exercising at least one of their particular characteristics. It is the combination of these three, to which I refer as “the …show more content…
Earlier in the poem, Durukan cues the reader to pay attention to how pain for the female is inevitable with the lines “one must run away / through the mother goes the pain not the father” (22). For that reason the line that states “water is holy” most likely problematizes the position of the fluid which is equally distanced to pain and pleasure in a woman’s body. As the speaker does not remember who claimed the water to be holy and remains inattentive to whether such expression is valid, the poem appears to be devaluing the assumed indisputability of the conviction that birth and childcare are “holy” –a conviction that usually functions to rationalize the pain women go through in the
Before moving onto the details of each element, it is important to note that for a poem to qualify as Gurlesque, all three elements must coexist exercising at least one of their particular characteristics. It is the combination of these three, to which I refer as “the …show more content…
Earlier in the poem, Durukan cues the reader to pay attention to how pain for the female is inevitable with the lines “one must run away / through the mother goes the pain not the father” (22). For that reason the line that states “water is holy” most likely problematizes the position of the fluid which is equally distanced to pain and pleasure in a woman’s body. As the speaker does not remember who claimed the water to be holy and remains inattentive to whether such expression is valid, the poem appears to be devaluing the assumed indisputability of the conviction that birth and childcare are “holy” –a conviction that usually functions to rationalize the pain women go through in the