“Daughterlands”: Personal and Political Mappings in Scottish Women’s Poetry

Scottish women’s poetry in recent years has evinced an interest in mapping daughterhood, frequently through linguistic negatives that challenge binary thinking. This essay argues that such “daughterlands” offer an imaginative alternative to the more familiar “motherland”: encompassing past, present, and future and positioning women in multiple roles, they have played a transformative role in the poetic imagining of “Scotland” in the new millennium. The essay considers the deployment of daughterly spaces by influential writers such as Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay, and Kathleen Jamie and then traces more recent instantiations by a younger generation of poets such as Claire Askew, Theresa Munoz, and Em Strang. In conclusion, it demonstrates the experiential and metaphoric potential of daughterhood for shaping broad political thinking in an explicitly public poem by Kay.