Output details

Unisex love poems

Szczepaniak’s novel-in-poems is based on research into historical forms of literature that target middle class female readers from the 19th Century to the present (such as social etiquette manuals, historical cookery instructions, household management guides, and contemporary glossy fashion magazines). Traditionally, these texts endeavour to circumscribe “appropriate” female behaviour and conduct as they construct gender roles. From this perspective, Unisex Love Poems has, through extensive research into relevant primary and secondary materials, reinterpreted these gendered forms of literature by interweaving and interconnecting them through fiction and poetry, in order to reinscribe the narrative structures that define gender identity for a contemporary context. Focalized through two protagonists who exchange a series of conversations, etiquette lessons, illustrated love poems, recipes, and legal documents from an ongoing divorce case, Szczepaniak aims to trace the effects of gendered language—the language of domesticity, relationships, and etiquette—from the 19th Century to the present, implicitly and explicitly drawing on conduct authors such as Harriet Martineau, Isabella Beeton, and Hugh Morris, as well as contemporary magazines that have taken on the role of conduct manuals in the present day, such as Cosmopolitan and Mademoiselle Magazine. The poetic and fiction narratives that comprise Unisex Love Poems aspire to navigate new artistic ground as, together, they explore the plasticity of language and the shifting ethics of words as their values transpose according to speaker and context. The research imperative was to complicate a variety of linguistic modes such as the idioms of love poetry, cookery, domesticity, conduct, legalese, and anatomy, in an effort to offer new contexts that have the potential to reshape how we define and describe gender roles.