Fieldnotes - "The Medusa’s Laughs and Cries in Razor Burn"

Fieldnotes Graduate Speaker Series - "The Medusa’s Laughs and Cries in Razor Burn"

Third-year PhD Candidate Tatiana Jahromi will be presenting a paper entitled "The Medusa’s Laughs and Cries in Razor Burn," through which they explore writing and queerness in Emma Rhodes's Razor Burn. Tatiana understands Rhodes's depictions of “her queer” as active: it is something that is, acts, and can be acted upon. Like woman and writing as (un)defined by Cixous, Rhodes’s queer is uncontained and, notably, she says that “[her] queer’s love language / is language.” Tatiana suggests that Rhodes's poems, by embodying an unabating, uncontained energy that nonetheless confront pressures pertaining to sex and sexuality, deconstruct the binary restrictions that linger in Cixous's “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Tatiana thus argues that Rhodes not only revisits Hélène Cixous's notion of “l’écriture féminine" by giving space for "[her] queer ... to talk" but more so revitalizes it.

As this might be our last Fieldnotes talk of the semester, please do attend! As usual, we will also be hosting a Pre-Fieldnotes Coffee Hour in the graduate offices on the third floor, so come have coffee and cookies with us before we take the talk upstairs! If you're unable to make it in person, please contact Fatima for the Zoom info.