Mixed Metaphors: Gender Trouble (and Cognitive Science) in Baudelaire

Faced with a language that grants every noun a grammatical gender, what can poets achieve by going against the grain? Can they at least generate a cumulative series of subliminal challenges, by establishing analogies and equivalences across terms gendered masculine and terms gendered feminine? Baudelaire is a particularly intriguing case. Taken together, his poems raise the possibility that mixed-gender comparisons, when deployed routinely across a substantial corpus, may generate a succession of cognitive jolts. Could they also end up jarring the mind out of its ruts of thought? Might they even chip away at a pernicious ideological system, one so deeply entrenched its victims are barely aware of it?