Belladonna’s new translation of Theory, A Sunday comes to us just in time to respond to a resurgence of pop feminism—on This is What a Feminist Looks Like t-shirts, at the MTV VMAs, from the mouths of Beyoncé and Lena Dunham, on a “Feminist But Feminine!” sign at the end of a Chanel runway—and to...

Motivation Motivation is defined as “the action of (conscious and unconscious) forces that determine behavior.” We ought therefore to ask ourselves what is the source of our motivation, so as to identify the reasons and motives [les motifs et les mobiles] that generate and nourish feminist consciousness, and at the same time to understand how these two factors affect and...

“The verse must be taken to the limit of expressiveness.” (Mayakovsky, How to Make Verses) It is then that the code opens to the rhyming body to formulate, against the present meaning, another meaning, for years to come, impossible. Julia Kristeva [1] Qu’est ce qui est incontournable (unskirtable!) dans le féminisme quand on écrit? What of one’s feminist consciousness...

The Fourth Estate Criticism inhabits the same space as the symbol: both are subject to interpretation, and are thus subjective. There is no more a science of the literary than there is a science of the symbol, even if various theories manage to tease out laws or detect constants. Critical reading, therefore, is nowhere near an exact science; in...

A-Morphs Madonna on television. “Like a Virgin,” she sings in her tiny, mechanical-doll voice. The teen idol of the moment, with exposed belly button and cross hanging from the ear. Bringing together the pornographic with the religious, simultaneously channeling two images that have demonstrated their staying power in Western imagination: the mother (Madonna, Mary, virgin mother of God)...

I first read La Théorie, un dimanche in Montréal twelve years ago. I was in graduate school. I had just moved back to Canada after living in the United States for a decade and a half. I was twenty-two. I did not think I needed feminism. I had never heard of Louise Cotnoir, of Gail...

The Subjecte of Interest [1] To want a woman-subject is to place oneself in a constant state of provocation and aggression: it is to speak of the future because the present literally kills. For those who manage to escape the massacre, the alternative within the patriarchal order is an absolute choice of either prison or exile. Banishment has “force of...

Editing and publishing poetry for a small press and a literary magazine has provided me with mentorship relationships and a kind of intimacy with texts I would not have been likely to encounter otherwise. I joined Belladonna* Collaborative in 2010 and one of the first projects I agreed to was working with Rachel Levitsky to see Theory, A Sunday through to...