... the model. Whereas Browning attempts to expunge gender and class difficulties, Duffy's poem moves through what Linda Kinnahan calls a "process of self-deconstruction" (2), to reveal the model as situated within or mediated by social discourses. In doing so, as Jane E. Thomas notes, Duffy not only "recognizes the lineament of [her] foremothers - the women of the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s" (78), but she has also taken the further step of reshaping ideas of the self by focusing on the indeterminacy of boundaries and the ways in which a naturalized fixing of those margins can prove dangerous to those "permanently" situated on the periphery. "Standing Female Nude" is a 4-stanza, 28-line poem which operates as a type of dramatic monologue, albeit an internal one. The situation is staged as a painting session, during which - as she poses - the model registers her feelings about the ...

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