The Formation of a Feminist Counterpublic in the Poetics of Lola Lemire Tostevin and Daphne Marlatt

In light of Nancy Fraser’s discussion of the formation of feminist counterpublics, this article assesses how Lola Lemire Tostevin and Daphne Marlatt have invented a public language in their writing for articulating the embodied experience of pregnancy. In so doing, I argue that Tostevin and Marlatt not only challenge the exclusion of women’s lives from avant-garde poetics – as diagnosed by Dorothy Lusk in Ogress Oblige – but they also contribute to the formation of a feminist counterpublic for articulating the social, political and physical experience of pregnancy in their writing

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