ORCID
https://orcid.org/0009-0005-5390-3005
Date of Award
2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Philosophy (Ph.D)
Department
English
First Advisor
Steve Mentz
Second Advisor
Raj Chetty
Third Advisor
Lee Ann Brown
Abstract
What can water teach us? The answer I posit is to embrace movement in all its forms. Reflecting on specific poetry collections of two experimental feminist poets, specifically South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s, All the Garbage of the World, Unite!, translated through Korean American poet Don Mee Choi, and Lebanese American poet Etel Adnan’s, Night, we are reminded of the myriad ways in which humans can move and survive in a foreign yet familiar world. This dissertation finds its support in the confluence of transnational contemporary feminist poetics, the Blue Humanities, hydrofeminism, and new materialism. Through the use of various critical discourses, this dissertation considers how watery movement and its dynamic capacities offer a new understanding of experimental feminist poetics. In this watery sense, a poem should be viewed as a dynamic temporal cybernetic system, a vessel, full of energy, simultaneously pulsing with the changing movements and constrictions of everyday life. This integrative analytic approach to feminist and watery poetic movement illuminates the ways in which humanity is a part of several systemic and systematic realities, recognizing the many models present to us while also embracing the freedom to switch amongst them.
Recommended Citation
Patalano, Tess, "OUT OF THE BLUE: HYDROFEMINISM AND MOVEMENT IN KIM HYESOON’S ALL THE GARBAGE OF THE WORLD, UNITE! AND ETEL ADNAN’S NIGHT" (2026). Theses and Dissertations. 1138.
https://scholar.stjohns.edu/theses_dissertations/1138