Abstract
"The flâneur is a poet is an agent free of purses, but a woman is not a woman without a strap over her shoulder or a clutch in her hand. (...) If a woman has no purse, we will imagine one for her," writes the contemporary US poet Anne Boyer in her poem "A Woman Shopping". In my paper, I look at the construction and performativity of femininity through material objects in her prose poems (from the 2015 collection Garments Against Women) in order to see what role these objects play in the poems and how they subvert, confirm, stress, or modify gender identities.
Feminist literary critique has looked at the objectification of women in various texts. Gendered objects have received less attention.
From Belinda's dressing table in The Rape of the Lock to girls gripping their handbags in Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings, material objects belonging to women perform specific function: they work as symbols, characterization etc. Building on literary anthropology and the reconsiderations of material culture, I read poems by Boyer to explore the various roles of feminine objects in her poems, the scripted femininity performed through objects and ritualized activities, and the possibilities of transformation these objects offer.