Behind Our Backs

In this daring study, Amy De'Ath develops a new type of literary criticism attuned to the way our lives are shaped by capital's impersonal compulsions - by what happens "behind our backs." Challenging the symptomatic interpretive methods of Western Marxism, De'Ath argues that value-critical accounts of Marx's work enable a feminist reading method that understands how value dissimulates itself from the social forms it generates, obscuring their historical content. Close reading works by Kay Gabriel, Bernadette Mayer, Bhanu Kapil, Marie Annharte Baker, Alli Warren, and Hannah Black, Behind Our Backs explains how these examples of everyday feminized ingenuity - by turns excessive, improper, ironic, and sincere - express the reality of capitalism's appearances, and in doing so call forth dialectical readers. Through this careful collation of poetic cases, capital is revealed to be not a force of human nature, but the expression of a dynamic social configuration - a logic realized every day, and one whose gendering inversions are felt and critiqued in the formal experiments of trans, queer, Indigenous, and diasporic verse. Feminized poetry, De'Ath demonstrates, is a central archive for the critique of political economy.