Identity, Gender and Embodiment in Neo-Avant-Garde Fiction and Art by Women in the United States (1970-1982)

Forging connections between the fields of literature and art history, this project constitutes the first in-depth study of the neo-avant-garde novel by women in the United States during the long 1970s which examines its interrelationships with feminist conceptualist art. It focuses on five novels by women who were active in both literary and artistic scenes during this era – Kathy Acker, Constance DeJong, Lucy Lippard, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Bernadette Mayer – and reads their novelistic engagements with language, gender and embodiment in conversation with a broader artistic corpus. It thus considers the synergies, overlaps and cross-pollination between neo-avant-garde fiction and art in the era of second-wave feminism, paying particular attention to the political strategies at play in these works. Combining literary-historical, art-historical and intersectional feminist insights within an intermedial framework, its overall aim is to understand how and to what effect these writers experimented with language and form in order to explore the gendered body as medium and subject matter, thereby subverting traditional representations of gender and identity whilst responding to, engaging with and transmuting contemporary feminist concerns. In doing so, it develops a novel methodological framework for studying the neo-avant-garde novel which accords equal importance to the novel as process and to the novel as text, revealing the connections between its various forms of embodiment.