Nethered Regions – An Anatomy of Mina Loy

Mina Loy is recognised as a writer who insists on the primacy of the body, but her fascination with corporeality is inextricable from her esoteric understanding of the soul. Over two volumes, Sara Crangle demonstrates how Loy’s visceral focus propels a prescient, mystical feminist vision that aims to resituate marginalised subjects within modernist culture. Nethered Regions – An Anatomy of Mina Loy provides new thinking on Loy’s approach to the foundations of existence, exploring sentience, primitivism, evolution, vitalism, and sensibility. Dubbing Loy an atavistic vanguardist, this book aligns sacrifice with satire, showing how Loy resists modernist anti-sentimentality by devising a feminist satirical mode in which sardonic aggression generates intimacy and proximity, rather than ironised distance. Loy’s attention to “low” body parts – feet, legs, genitals, bellies, wombs – is illuminated in chapters theorising her engagement with dissident sexualities (queerness, prostitution, women’s pleasure); pictorial-poetic cartographies of desire; and the accursed muse, the unsung counterpart to the poète maudit.