Written by Gabrielle Killick.
Image credit: Pexels, provided by the author.
As Martial Law was lifted and greater artistic freedom was granted, the Taiwanese poetry scene saw a boom in so-called “erotic” writing. An assortment of terms – including qingyu 情慾 (“sensual”), seqing 色情 (“sexually explicit”) or qingse 情色 (“erotic”) – has been used to designate women’s poetry centring on the body and its desires. But can we see something beyond these restrictive labels? What does the attention to corporeality in poetry reveal about a wider movement to resist patriarchal norms?
Hsia Yü (夏宇), born Huang Ching-chi (黃慶綺) (1956-), and Yen Ai Lin (顏艾琳) (1968-) are two poets who converge in their interest in the body; the former is known for her “provocative” writing exploring “the sensuous and quirky interface between the pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of the text”, while the latter’s work has been described by her English translator, Jenn Marie Nunes, as “sticky with embodied sensation.”
Until the late 1980s, writing about women’s corporeal experiences was as uncommon as it was taboo; poetry was not only a male-dominated field, it was also viewed as the “language of the soul” (心靈語言). The themes found in Yen’s collections Abstract Map《抽象的地圖》(1994), Bone Skin Flesh《骨皮肉》(1997) and Her Side《她方》(2004), as well as in Hsia’s Memoranda《備忘錄》(1984) and Ventriloquy《腹語》(1991) thus challenge poetic codes; the body represented is sometimes vulnerable, at other times ironic and playful, but always unapologetic.
Yen Ai Lin’s and Hsia Yü’s poetry: towards “phenomenological ecofeminism”?
While creating a space for self-exploration, Yen’s and Hsia’s work does not promote a kind of individualism preoccupied solely with the self, foregrounding the body’s larger embeddedness in the natural world instead. A network of interactions between embodiment, environment, and feminism emerges from their poetry, culminating in what I see as a form of “phenomenological ecofeminism” that goes beyond “personal feminism.”
What is meant by “phenomenological ecofeminism”? Let’s first dissect the terms individually. In this article, the definition of phenomenology is based upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the body and the world are engaged in a “chiasmic intertwining”: inextricably part of “the flesh of the world,” bodies inhabit space rather than merely being in space. Ecofeminism, on the other hand, is a neologism coined by Françoise d’Eaubonne in 1974 to refer to the joint oppression of women and nature by patriarchal systems, often rooted in dualisms that position mind over body, human over animal, man over woman.
In “phenomenological ecofeminism,” body, ecology, and feminism are conceived as three threads woven together. What is the significance of their convergence? Each term questions, challenges, and ultimately responds to concerns arising from the other. For instance, ecofeminists have often been criticised for grouping women exclusively in relation to their oppression, creating an overgeneralised “we” that flattens individual experiences. Phenomenology, by contrast, contains the risk of reproducing anthropocentric tendencies that privilege an overly particular and humanistic “I.”
Rather than a conceptual panacea, “phenomenological ecofeminism” animates tensions between general and particular by centring the body’s material inseparability from the larger natural world. In Yen’s and Hsia’s poetry, this manifests in depictions of bodies producing breastmilk, menstruating, and taking non-human forms – all of which constitute a feminist move to challenge patriarchal and anthropocentric standards. Their work is at the intersection of difference and connection, where embodiment meets relationality to human and non-human others.
The focus on “flows” – both bodily and natural – stems from the challenge they pose to society’s structures by virtue of their unpredictable way of leaking, spilling, and exuding. Fluids push the boundaries of comfort while still signalling continuity and connection, providing an apposite lens to explore “phenomenological ecofeminism” in Yen’s and Hsia’s poetry.
Reclaiming the “abject” bodily fluids
One of the ways Yen and Hsia highlight the body in its materiality is through depictions of menstruating and lactating individuals. As uncomfortable reminders of our mortality and fallibility, bodily fluids are considered taboo. They make us question our relationship to the world, to others, to the self; they are what Julia Kristeva calls “abject” in that they threaten to break down “identity, system, order” by not respecting borders.
It is important to distinguish between two types of abjection. For Kristeva, the abject initially describes a necessary psychological process in infancy enabling the subject to establish boundaries and protect itself against potential danger. Social abjection, by contrast, emerges when the fear of the abject is displaced onto groups and people, becoming a tool for exclusion. Bodily fluids associated with womanhood, including menstrual blood and breastmilk, are a case in point: they are often considered improper and unclean, whereas “neither tears nor sperm,” claims Kristeva, “have any polluting value.” The stigma attached to fluids extends to the bodies that produce them: menstruating individuals are seen as erratic or disgusting, while breastfeeding in public is deemed shameful.
Yen and Hsia use strategies of exposition in their poetry to defy this social abjection. In other words, they radically include into poetic language precisely what society – and poetry itself – has traditionally excluded.
“Summer Rain” 《暑雨》 and “Heavy Rain” 《大雨》 by Yen Ai Lin present the sky as an overflowing breast and rain as breastmilk, thereby tying the flow of the body to that of the natural world. In the poems, the breast(s) are monstrous, and the feeding is violent; the final stanza of “Heavy Rain” reads “and a brutal maternity / suddenly / forces us to feed/brimming with too much / slightly sour milk” (translation my own). Instead of hiding the maternal in line with patriarchal expectations, Yen places the excessive, monstrous maternity at the forefront, reclaiming what has been culturally repressed as “abject.”
The opposite of lactation can be said to be menstruation, signalling the absence of childbirth. However, it is similarly subject to social abjection – Hsia Yü’s poem “Common knowledge” 《一般見識》confronts this through irony: “a woman / bleeds once / a month / understands the language of the snake / good at ambushes / is not suitable for keeping appointments” (translation by Michelle Yeh). Hsia plays on the misogynistic assumptions about menstruating people, namely that they are irrational and unreliable. By mimicking patriarchal and rules-based discourse – with shìyú 適於 (“suitable for”) and bùyí 不宜 (“not suitable”) as prime examples – Hsia exposes its absurdity.
Together, Yen’s and Hsia’s poems allow us to rethink the abject, not to assimilate or erase it, but in order to redefine it without the shaming that leads to societal exclusion. In this reconfiguration, bodily fluids are only “abject” insofar as they are boundary-breaking, exposing the vulnerability and materiality of the body. In fact, it is through the unapologetic exposition of the abject’s transgressive nature that Yen and Hsia are able to better combat its harmful side, the one that casts certain bodily fluids as taboo.
Watery flows between body and world
In addition to bodily fluids, Yen and Hsia foreground another type of “flow” in their poetry – water. For instance, Hsia Yü’s “Jiang Yuan” 《姜嫄》(translation by Michelle Yeh) takes rain as the catalyst for sexual desire (“whenever it rains / I feel like / copulating, propagating”), while Yen Ai Lin’s “Desire, in the Undercurrent of Night, Washes Ashore” 《慾望在夜的暗潮 ⋅上岸》uses the image of tides to convey sexuality: “let my tide / swell / full / against your banks / just once” (translation by Jenn Marie Nunes).
What is the significance of water imagery? I believe that it establishes connection on two levels. First, Yen’s “my tide” (emphasis mine) suggests that water (and hence nature) is not separate from our bodies but is inseparable from our own materiality. Simultaneously, however, water displays how our bodies also exist within the natural world. “Jiang Yuan” reinforces this idea by establishing a tripartite relationship between rainwater, the non-human, and the human body: “like a beast / in a hidden cave / whenever it rains / like a beast / using the human way.”
The two-way directionality of watery flows is representative of the larger movement at work in the concept of phenomenological ecofeminism. Phenomenology grounds ecofeminism in corporeality, with the assertion of “my body” reducing “the temptation to grandiose assertions” in the words of Adrienne Rich. In turn, ecofeminism can help mitigate the anthropocentric tendencies present in phenomenology, pointing to a connection found outside “my” body.
Flow-as-connection
Reading Yen Ai Lin’s and Hsia Yü’s work together provides avenues for reconfiguring the relationship between body, environment, and feminism. Both poets show us that resistance to patriarchal ideals in the post-Martial Law era can be enacted by foregrounding connection: to the self, to others, to nature, and to non-human animals.
Gabrielle Killick holds a BA in Chinese Studies from the University of Cambridge and has recently completed her MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation from the University of Oxford. Her research interest lies in ecofeminist and queer themes in contemporary Taiwanese literature, with a particular focus on the body.