디킨슨의 경계적 젠더와 상상력

Dickinson's Liminal Gender and Imagination: Focusing on Body and Bee Imagery

This paper aims to explore how Dickinson's complex poetry-writing exemplifies the way she challenges conventional attitude towards categories such as gender, sex and identity. While representing the erotic body, Dickinson taps poetic language that valorizes what is queering. It is through the understanding of the most fundamental levels of linguistic power that Dickinson amplifies her imagination and constructs her poetics of body. Drawing upon feminist readings of Dickinson's erotic desire, this paper examines the way in which bee bodies and variant words, dashes, and nuanced meaning in Dickinson's poems suggest her ample eroticism. Dickinson manipulates and recombines social and religious terms by creating poetic forms that twist received grammar and disrupts the subject/predicate propositions. Poetic language becomes the site for liminal gender, lesbian desire, and queering while she envisions the transgressive bee bodies that come close to the inscrutable and all-inclusive unconscious, subverting realist conventions. Dickinson's lesbian body or lesbianism, however, is not merely to manifest the importance of being woman, or consecrate feminity or a gynocentric world. Rather, her lesbianism calls into question the stability of gender. Insofar as grammar puts constraints on thought or on the thinkable itself, it would be wrong to use received grammar for expressing radical views. Dickinson's unusual poetic forms are clearly irritating for some readers, yet the significance of her poetry lies in this volcanic compositional radicality. For Dickinson, poetry is often engaged with love or sex, and the love is erotic bodily experience. Her poetics of body epitomizes Deleuzean signs of love that lead us to possibility, another world.