Abstract:
This paper will examine female specularity and the male body in Loma Crozier's "Penis Poems," a suite of poems from her 1988 collection, ' Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence'. Her eroticization and de-mystification of the male body challenges cultural limitations placed upon women's appreciation of the male body. Crozier searches for new ways to write and think about pleasure while acknowledging the apparent contradiction of heterosexual feminism. She reconfigures the so-called male "desiring gaze," and writes the male body as both object of desire and locus of vulnerability. Crozier insists that the male body can bear the burden of the gaze, and further, that the female gaze opens up the cultural definition of the male body, and encourages erotic mutuality.
