My Body, the Conduit

Abstract

My Body, the Conduit is a poetry collection that, informed by confessional and documentary poetic traditions, is fundamentally concerned with the lived experiences of the body. It is particularly interested in studying the speaker's patterns of experience from a wider systemic viewpoint and framing them in sociohistorical contexts. The collection grapples with the diagnosis, treatment, and historical gynecological framings of Genito-Pelvic Pain Disorder (also known as Penetration Disorder and, formerly, Vaginismus) and virginity with a particular interest in investigating heteronormative bias, bisexual erasure, and racism, as well as Genito-Pelvic Pain Disorder's comorbidity with sexual assault, trauma, depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts. The collection also grapples with Iranian-/American gender, race, and national identities; familial storytelling; and the speaker's experience of relearning her first language (Persian/Farsi) within the context of western exploitation of Iranian oil as well as the forty-year-old Cold War between the United States and Iran. There is some power in the articulation of violences against the body, individual and collective. Rather than reproduce violences on a page for the sake of mimesis, this work belongs to a tradition of poetry of witness that challenges constructions of identity as singular and stagnant. The speaker bears witness to Iranian-American experience, challenges our country's heteronormative gynecological and social history, and broadens the scope of what we mean by "the body."