Mina Loy: The feminine inscription of modernism

This study re-revaluates the modernist challenge to bourgeois art and life through a feminist and poststructuralist reading of the selected early poetry of the British-American Mina Loy (1882-1966). I argue that Mina Loy and her work represent the other of modernist cultural production and draw on French feminist theory to show how the objectification of woman in modernist aesthetics--as something to be controlled, dominated and contained--is the arena of Mina Loy\u27s struggle to achieve selfhood. I see Loy\u27s poetry as an eruption of this objectification, through which she becomes a speaking subject. Avant-garde practice, in its disruption of the subject and the codes of its representation, I suggest, inscribes a non-linear, heterogeneous space akin to what recent feminist theorists term the feminine. What Loy\u27s relationship is to this new space, its risks, and how she comes to speak it are the concerns of this study. Her relationship and response to Italian Futurism and the American Dada of Marcel Duchamp reveal Loy\u27s concern with feminine subjectivity at a time when the avant-garde was disrupting identities of all sorts. I argue that her modernist predicament engenders a different relation to language and desire, most evident in the character of her humor and her different assimilation of modernist forms