Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction

In this daring study, Amy De'Ath develops a new type of literary criticism attuned to the wayour lives are shaped by capital's impersonal compulsions – by what happens "behind our backs." Challenging the symptomatic interpretive methods of Western Marxism, De'Ath argues that value-critical accounts of Marx's work enable a feminist reading methodthat understands how value dissimulates itself from the social forms it generates, obscuring their historical content. Close reading works by Kay Gabriel, Bernadette Mayer, Bhanu Kapil, Marie Annharte Baker, Alli Warren, and Hannah Black, Behind Our Backs explains how these examples of everyday feminized ingenuity—by turns excessive, improper, ironic, and sincere—express the reality of capitalism's appearances, and in doing so call forth dialectical readers. Through this careful collation of poetic cases, capital is revealed to be not a force of human nature, but the expression of a dynamic social configuration—a logic realized every day, and one whose gendering inversions are felt and critiqued in the poetic experiments of trans, queer, Indigenous, and diasporic writing. Feminized poetry, De'Ath demonstrates, is both a central archive and theoretical powerhouse for the critique of political economy.