Domestications, Domesticities and Other Gender Matters

Abstract

This article uses Lyotard’s theory linking the origins of thinking with desire and with the existence of a sexually-differentiated body to examine Maria-Mercè Marçal’s poem. “El meu amor sense casa”, as a “lyrical practice of feminism and difference, a writing of the body.” From this perspective, it pays attention to Marçal’s poetry as an inscription of sexual difference in language and literary practices, transforming them, destabilizing them and turning them into thinking tools for all. The central figure of the home or domus in the poem embodies the binary ambiguities that are largely undone by the appropriation of a hegemonic discourse by a body that is generically and sexually “different”. Marçal’s poem thus provides an architectural genealogy of a poetic subject that thinks in a body that is both female and lesbian.