Roaring girls, bogie wives, and the Queen of Sheba : dissidence, desire and dreamwork in the poetry of Kathleen Jamie

Although Kathleen Jamie’s stature as a writer is now increasingly consolidated by public acclaim, this article was written when she was a newly emergent talent in the post-Renaissance regiment of contemporary Scottish women poets, and represents the first sustained analysis of identity politics in her work. Three times marginalized, by gender, class and nationality, the emancipatory energies of Jamie’s writing are co-aligned and coterminous with her country’s drive towards autonomy. Jamie champions the freedom to be heterogeneous, to transgress discursive boundaries and, above all, to resist the monolithic forms of cultural essentialism. A prime stratagem in Jamie’s subversion of the status quo is her deployment of polyglossic, multifold and plural forms of poetic discourse in her witty, energetic defiance of the cultural bridle of ‘English-male-posh-grown-up-dead speech’ (Liz Lochhead’s phrase). Drawing on theories of ‘otherness’, performance and excess from Bakhtin, Butler, Kristeva and Irigaray, this study offers a provocative examination of Jamie’s subversive raids on the ‘twin colonisations; Maleness and Englishness’