Abstract

A lesbian poetics of dismembering, as I argue, is a creative process that disorients from general notions of body and memory. Through examining such a poetics, found across a selection of lesbian works of grief, I critique the modes by which the state coerces, co-opts, and mobilizes a certain crafting of the body and memory in efforts to amass and concentrate power, as well as how desire and grief are taken up both in service of, and counter to, such statecraft operations. I aim to both emphasize and take part in a lesbian poetics that destroys the very terms of empire–fleeing its own uptake and offering nothing to fill this gap; no balm for this uncertainty.