LAUSR

Abstract:Dissatisfied with the exclusion of women from preceding avant-gardes, the overlapping communities that formed around the feminist avant-garde magazines Chain, Raddle Moon, HOW(ever), and HOW2 attempted to forge alternative modes of connection and avant-garde identities. Feminist avant-garde magazines instantiated a "politics of the forum," an editorial and poetic pedagogy based on hospitality and non-hierarchical dialogue. Sometimes this implicit politics was made explicit in so-called magazine "forums," in which poets could recast their feminist avant-garde identity, represent a diversity of voices, and overcome the usual distinction between identity and theory within avant-garde discourse. In their critique of previous models of avant-gardism by way of little magazines, feminist avant-garde writers after 1980 invite us to rethink the conventional canonization of avant-garde groups and of "modernist magazines," and to ask what is at stake in a more hospitable model of avant-gardism for the present day.