Adrienne Rich’s Politics Of Location

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), the contemporary American poetess, essayist and feminist, is renowned for her ideas on identity politics concerning the issues of gender, race and class since the 1970s. She is literarily and politically committed to social justice and equality. The issue of location and the problem of the subject intertwine in Rich’s works after 1970s. Her prose Arts of the Possible:Essays and Conversations (2001) is one of the key documents that discusses the politics of "location".This thesis focuses on the politics of location and responds to Rich’s exploration of the body or her own body—her identity as female, white, Jewish and lesbian. Taking as its starting point Rich’s concern with the relation between the pronouns "I" and "we", between the individual and the collective subjects, the thesis explores the significance of the interconnectedness between the personal and the political from political and aesthetic dimension in Rich’s works. Through textual analysis of Rich’s concern on the issues of gender, race, and collective identity, this thesis illustrates how Rich situates the body or identity, on the one hand, as personal and sentient, and as public and responsible on the other. The exploration is hoped to be instructional and essential to evaluate Rich’s political ideas in her literary works, and particularly to understand her ideas about the politics of location.