Abstract: »This paper is taken from a chapter of my dissertation that focuses on women’s Yiddish poetry and prose that engaged with sexual desire and themes of free love, particularly in the 1920s. Since women’s desire was often depicted as the vehicle by which they became subservient to men, the few women in this period who expressed desire did so in a consciously bold and performative manner, at times employing sadomasochistic imagery. This reflects a gendered reality by which desiring women had to contend with the realities of power differentials between men and women, as well as the experiences and specters of sexual harrassment and rape. The chapter then turns to several writers’ comparison of their own sexual boldness with the modesty of their female forebears, looking at the simultaneous operation of a celebration of sexual liberation with a consciousness of the gendered power dynamics that conspired to make sex and love all but free. This presentation will focus specifically on the poetry of Celia Dropkin, examining how she utilized Freudian discourses to contrast her mother’s repressed sexuality with her own liberated one, while simultaneously using sadomasochistic imagery to highlight how pleasure and pain were necessarily bound together for the sexually ‘liberated’ woman. This paper also argues against an ongoing strand in Dropkin’s reception that depicts her works as “uninhibited diary jottings” from a body that “won’t let up” (to quote Shmuel Niger) by highlighting the metapoetic elements in her poetry that help reposition her as a conscious participant in modernist trends that emphasized poetry’s performativity and that viewed the erotic as a wellspring of creativity. I argue that she also demonstrates keen awareness of the gendered perceptions of the erotic elements of her work, and that she, in the words of Audre Lorde, nonetheless used the erotic “as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered,” and embraced depictions of sadomasochistic desires to make clear that she was fully aware of the stakes for a woman who dares to assert sexual and creative desires and ambitions, and that the way forward was to insist on playful pleasure in the pain.« (Source: Online Program)

Wikipedia: History of the Americas: History of the United States | Literature: American literature / Celia Dropkin | Sex and the law: Rape, Sexual harassment