Feminist Studies in English Literature

Vol. 24, No. 1 (2016)

http://dx.doi.org/10.15796/fsel.2016.24.1.002

Hijacking the Type:

Cathy Park Hong’s Poetry against

Conceptual Whiteness

Robert Grotjohn

(Chonnam National University)

Since the beginning of her career, Cathy Park Hong has

published poems with women speakers, characters, and personae

that resist sexist constructions. Her inclusion in Gurlesque: The New

Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics, the notorious 2010 anthology

edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg, solidifies her

position in the poetry of third-wave feminism, a “version of

feminism” that, among other things, claims to be “more inclusive

and diverse than the second wave,” “to have a broader vision of

politics,” and “to focus on more than just women’s issues”

(Snyder 180, 181). The work in that anthology “assaults the norms

of acceptable female behavior by irreverently deploying gender

stereotypes to subversive ends” (Glenum 11). Subversion is at the

core of four recent poems in which Hong continues in her



34 Robert Grotjohn

feminist poetic while engaging in the racial politics of the

avant-garde.

In an essay published in New Republic online in October

2015, Hong identifies what she calls “a new movement in

American poetry.” According to Hong, this movement has been

“galvanized by the activism of Black Lives Matter” and

“spearheaded by writers of color who are at home in social media

activism and print magazines.” While these poets write from

various aesthetic perspectives, “they share a common belief that as

poets, they must engage in social practice” (“There’s a New

Movement”). The four poems I consider below engage in that

practice, but, before I turn to them, I will contextualize Hong’s

recent statement as part of a much larger ongoing discussion. That

larger discussion is part of what Ramón Saldívar has argued is a

“post-race aesthetic,” a “new aesthetic” that “is creating” ways “to

deal with the meaning of race in a time when race supposedly no

longer matters” (“Historical Fantasy” 575). This aesthetic builds on

traditional identity politics but “will be racially undetermined in

its reflection of American identities, requiring a blend of [ethnic]

identities, necessitating a move beyond the American racial binary

of black and white” (“Imagining Cultures” 16).

I. Context: Challenging the Avant-Garde Establishment

In the New Republic essay, Hong identifies the conceptual

poet Kenneth Goldsmith as an example of the old against which

the new poetics of social practice is moving. “Conceptual Poetry,”