Fluid Identity and Feminine Language: Irigarayan Subjectivity from Nancy’s “Vague” to Sexton and Rich

 

Fluid Identity and Feminine Language: Irigarayan Subjectivity from Nancy’s “Vague” to Sexton and Rich

Abstract

This essay examines how Farheen Bhuiyan Nancy’s English poem “Vague” enacts a fluid, fragmented female subjectivity in dialogue with Luce Irigaray’s feminist project (This Sex Which Is Not One, 1977). By analyzing lines that refuse fixed identity—“Cracked mirror but vintage... Fragmented self but with an ancient soul”—the paper argues that “Vague” embodies Irigaray’s concept of parler-femme: poetic language that resists phallogocentric unity in favor of multiplicity and embodied difference. To contextualize “Vague” within feminist poetic lineage, the essay also highlights how Anne Sexton (“Her Kind”) and Adrienne Rich (“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” When We Dead Awaken) similarly deploy fragmented voices and alternative imagistic registers to subvert normative female roles. In doing so, these poets contribute to a feminist poetics that privileges fluidity, ancestral power, and collective female solidarity.

1. Introduction

Postmodern feminist literary thought, especially since Luce Irigaray (1977), has called for culturally new forms of expression that resist masculinist constraint—celebrating fragmentation, fluidity, and embodied multiplicity. This essay reads Nancy’s “Vague” as a contemporary instantiation of Irigaray’s fluid female subject—a fractured yet potent self that speaks in non-linear, poetic registers. By also engaging with Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich, we situate Nancy in a continuum of parler-femme poets who reimagine female identity through performative, anti-canonical aesthetic forms.

2. Irigaray’s Fluid Subjectivity and Parler-Femme

Irigaray critiques Western symbolic logic for reducing women to “supporting matter” and treating female subjectivity as lacking (Irigaray, 1977) . She proposes a feminine language—parler-femme—characterized by syntax disruption, fluidity, and sensory evocation, resisting phallocentric discourse (Irigaray, 1977; literary criticism) . The aim is not to define essential womanhood, but to open space for experiential multiplicity and embodied consciousness.

3. “Vague” and Irigarayan Syntax

Nancy’s poem begins:

“Cracked mirror but vintage,
Fragmented self but with an ancient soul...”

Here, the fractured mirror implies a refusal to reflect a singular ideal: instead, it presents multiplicity, echoing Irigaray’s specular surface—a scintillating, curved self-image (Irigaray, 1977) . Language is associative, resisting hierarchical structure, much like parler-femme: non-linear, sensory, embodied.

Further, the mind–body split and gambit signify conscious engagement with fragmentation—a strategic embrace of dislocation as creative resistance, rather than mere fragmentation.

4. Sexton’s “Her Kind”: Witch, Housewife, Martyr

Anne Sexton reclaims the witch’s outsider status to challenge domestic stereotypes. In “Her Kind”, each verse showcases a different female archetype—witch, housewife, martyr—ending with “I have been her kind.” This multiplicity exemplifies Irigaray’s model of fluid subjectivity and resistance to fixed roles . Sexton’s confessional fragmentation resists singular identity, while her refrain unifies diverse subjectivities into a defiant, collective female voice.

5. Rich’s Re-Vision and Language of Reclamation

Adrienne Rich, in her key essay When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision (1972), advocates reclaiming female voices long erased by patriarchal literary history (en.wikipedia.org). Poems like “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” demonstrate how women’s texts can encode subversive resistance through imagery and fragmentation. Rich’s later work, especially in The Dream of a Common Language, embraces multiple voices and lesbian solidarity as a challenge to language shaped by male hierarchy (en.wikipedia.org).

Both Sexton and Rich illustrate Irigaray’s fluid, embodied subjectivity through poetic form—non-linear, imagistic, resisting phallocentric unity.

6. Comparative Analysis

Feature Nancy (“Vague”) Sexton (“Her Kind”) Rich (Re-Vision)
Form Fragmented metaphors, loose syntax Tripartite archetypes with refrain Novel narrative lyric
Language Associative, poetic, embodied Refrain-driven, confessional Revisionist, intertextual
Subject Fluid, fractured self; ancestral voice Witch/housewife/martyr identities Collective female solidarity
Irigarayan echoes Mirror imagery; mind-body gambit Biblical/folk references disrupting norms Re-vision of tradition, poetic re-naming

7. Conclusion

Nancy’s “Vague”, in dialogue with Sexton and Rich, participates in a trajectory of parler-femme—poetic voices that defy phallocentric static identity through fluid, embodied, performative language. Invoking fractured mirrors, ancestral threads, and collective voice, these poets exemplify Irigaray’s vision: women creating literary forms that reflect multiplicity, body, and ancestral memory, liberating themselves from monolithic, patriarchal self-definition.

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