Bad Influences and Willful Subjects

This chapter tracks another one of Muriel Rukeyser's proliferating and multigenre projects. It analyzes the unfinished, unpublished, rejected, and canceled lectures, essays, and radio programs that make up the large body of extra-textual materials surrounding The Life of Poetry, a text which itself represents only a small part of the complex historiographic, feminist, and philosophical theories Rukeyser was developing in the forties and fifties. In bringing together questions about gender and genre from the outset, the chapter reveals one of Rukeyser's central projects in the text: to unveil and confront the gender norms of Cold War containment culture, norms that positioned the queer body and the communist body as dangerous, and the male body as antagonistic to the female body, in ways that underscore the policing of literary and disciplinary categories. The chapter also explores how Rukeyser produced a series of radio shows in the late forties that deepened her thinking on questions of queer American traditions, the avant-garde, and Cold War politics. The chapter recovers archival materials and highlights Rukeyser's interest in thinking about the wasted texts, influences, and experiences we use to create and make with, what she often describes as “bad influences.”