feminine gospels key notes

the long queen

• theme of time, idealisation of female experience, absence of men, power

• ‘taken Time for a husband’

• transforms ugly parts of girlhood into beautiful images

• links well with history as they are opposites of each other with the same themes

WWS

overwhelming, asyndeton, women belonging to society, autonomy taken, exaggeration of female stereotypes

• took to the streets where the lights from the shops ran like paint in the rain

• metamorphosis into a shopping centre (women defined as one-dimensional)

• skirts were glass doors opening and closing

• lungs glittered with chandeliers (expectation of beauty)

  pairs well with anon

history

Themes: erasure of women, subverting traditional depictions of women, exhaustion of female experience, interrupting female history

Links: Long queen, virgin’s memo

• bones in a bed, not a tooth in her head, half dead

• pulled on a coat that hung from a hook on the door, lay on the sofa

• she was history

• how the saint whistled and spat in the flames

• shit wrapped in a newspaper posted onto the floor

virign’s memo

themes: erasure of women, voicelessness of women, exclusion of women from public sphere, importance of female views

links: long queen, history, anon

• ‘the virgin’s memo’

• text illegible/untranslatable

• alphabetical

• unicorn

Anon

themes: position of women in history, dismemberment, exclusion of women from legacy

links: history (interrupting female history), VM

• maybe a nurse, a nanny, maybe a nun

• Anon (interrupts)

• a girl I met was willing to bet that she still lived on - Anon -

• kept her skull on a shelf…and swore that one day ..it cleared its throat as though it had something to get off its chest

the laughter

themes: eruption of feminism, women against women, development of women’s rights

links: wws

• Its desks the small coffins of lessons, its blackboards the tombstones of learning [...] the grass on the playing fields grew like glass on a grave

• a gurgle, a ripple, a dribble, a babble’

• then walked into the sea…danced her away like a groom with a bride

white writing

themes: lesbian relationships, restricted, rebellion, protection

links: the cord, the laughter

• I write them white

• vows, prayers, laws, rules, news, poems

• as we lift up our skirts in the sea, wade

• inked water in moonlight

the cord

themes: motherhood, protection, cyclical

links: white writing

• they cut the cord she was born with and buried it under a tree

• had a princess spun it from a golden spinning wheel

• black unreadable books

• her cord

• stars were her mother’s eyes

• screech of an owl..was the sound of a baby’s cry