WHAT A WOMAN MUST DO: REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMININITY IN THE POETRY OF URSULA RUCKER

Abstract

The paper analyses gender related and feminist aspects in the poetry of a contemporary American poetess Ursula Rucker who has been writing and performing, for almost two decades, at the meeting point of popular culture and high art, in a characteristic genre of spoken word. By analysing a selection of Rucker–s poems, the author attempts to identify the layers of African-American social and cultural heritage, as well as to locate the poetess within the tradition of Black poetry and explain her poetic expression as an amalgam of revolutionary and activist poetry written by Black women in 1970–s and modern tendencies related to hiphop culture. For the purpose of contextualisation of Ursula Rucker–s opus, the paper also contains a brief genesis of Black feminism and contemporary Afro-American literary expression.