Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, Spanish and Portuguese

This dissertation examines the use of vision (the sense of sight) and visuality (social seeing) in four women poets of the 1980s and 1990s in Spain: Ana Rossetti, Maria-Merce Marcal, Aurora Luque, and Montserrat Abello. All four combine the use of vision and visuality with questions of gender performance and identity as a challenge to normative and culturally constructed gender(ed) behavior. The very fact that the majority of the lyric voices in their poems does not have a defined gender, as many of the people that they view do not, permits them to move from subjectivation to subjectification. Through the manifestation of gender “difference,” the various lyric voices leave behind their status as marginalized members of Western gendered culture. Although not all of the lyric voices are ungendered or ambiguously gendered, sufficient questions of, and challenges to normative gendered behavior exist to warrant including these four poets in the same study, despite their ostensible differences. The theoretical framework for this study focuses on Freudian ideas of voyeurism and exhibitionism as well as pleasurable and unpleasurable looking (scopophilia and scopophobia), Foucauldian ideas of power, and Lacanian ideas of the mirror stage and subjectivity. The major flaw with all three when applying them to the poetic texts is that they all base their ideas on the normative man/woman binary. This by extension implies the subjection of the lyric voices, and the people and objects that they view, to what Judith Butler calls the heterosexual matrix. This idea assumes the “natural” existence of two genders, men and women, with the sexual relationships between them the only and “natural” option. This leaves out all other manifestations of gender as non-existent or deviant at the very least. Despite the distinctions between their works, due to writing at different times, with different approaches, and also from different cultural experiences (Rossetti and Luque write in Spanish, Ma (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Stephen Summerhill (Advisor) Subjects: