Dress Rehearsals and Dress Rehearsals: How Womanhood Is Performed In The Prose Poem. The contemporary prose poem as a screen, a mosh pit and a site of gendered subversion

Abstract

Through an exegesis and poetry collection, this thesis explores how womanhood is performed in the contemporary prose poem. Dress Rehearsals is a book-length-poetry-collection that documents a decade of performing womanhood. This research articulates autoethnographic experiences of fandom, gender, queerness, feminism, and features a surreal sequence that represents an intimate relationship with the femme fatale, renamed as the femme menace. The PhD proposes an energised synergy between prose poetry, gender performance and the mosh pits of live music.