Queer Studies: Aspects of Homosexuality in Contemporary French Literature and Cinema
Session Coordinator: Flavia Vernescu
Department of Modern Languages, University of Northern Iowa
254 Baker Hall, Cedar Falls, IA 50613
flavia.vernescu@cfu.net

Métamorphoses du désir: la quête de soi et de l’autre dans Lecorps lesbien de Monique Wittig

En 1964, Monique Wittig gagnait le Prix Médicis pour son premier roman, The Opoponax, dont la narration au présent, la structure fragmentée dans le style du Nouveau Roman et la qualité poétique, typique de l’écriture féminine, ont attire tout de suite l’attention des critiques. Cinq ans après, dans Les guerrières, les lycéennes de son premier roman, ont cede la place a des femmes mures, de vraies Amazones, qui se suffisent a elles-mêmes, qui défient toute tendance de suprématie de la race male. En 1973, Wittig publie Le corps lesbien. Cette fois, tout symbole masculin disparaît. L’auteur se concentre exclusivement sur le corps féminin et sur ses relations d’amour, d’intimité entre les femmes. Cette communication se propose d’explorer les différents moyens d’articulation du désir ainsi que le double mouvement qu’il engendre : la quête de soi, avec plusieurs aspects qui s’y rattachent (identité, narcissisme, perte de soi), mais aussi la quête de l’autre (identification, projection, mise en abyme). On va aussi examiner les rapports qui s’établissent entre le corps féminin et le corps du texte, car comme le remarque Wittig elle-même : « Réciter son propre corps tout comme réciter le corps de l’autre, revient a réciter des mots dont le livre est fait ».

Flavia Vernescu
University of Northern Iowa
flavia.vernescu@cfu.net

‘Faux amis:’ False Friends and Deceptive Cognates in the Works of Herve Guibert
      
This talk considers the role of lying Hervé Guibert's auto-fictional text, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life.  Although presented as a work of fiction, so much of Guibert's story corresponds to the reality of his life that the reader is forced to question the boundary between fact and fiction. What makes the text worthy of analysis is not that the journal-like narrative structure, plotless recounting of the quotidian, and protagonist named after the author invite us to view the story as true, but that once Guibert has got his reader to "believe him," he deliberately starts to falsify the truth. The result is a work that reflects the reality-shattering effects of contracting AIDS, and depicts the author's struggle with a truth in the way that neither an "honest" autobiography nor an overt fiction could. To posit the presence of an authorial voice in the text, I will examine the narrative in detail, using Genette's structural tools of mood, voice and time. I will also consider the representations of illness in Guibert's other works and in works by his contemporaries as a means of valorizing Guibert's skillful dissimulations.  I will conclude by arguing that Guibert's rejection of the "true story," allows him write a more compelling, and therefore more "real" tale of illness and anger than in other examples of AIDS-writing.

Thomas J. D. Armbrecht
University of Wisconsin-Madison
tjarmbrecht@wisc.edu

Straightening TheCloset: Queerness as Performance in Francis Weber’s Le Placard

Weber’s film, Le Placard (2001), is the tale of François, an accountant for a condom factory. Having learned he’s to be fired, François conspires with his neighbor (a gay man) who advises him to pretend he’s gay, thereby forcing the company to retain him lest they be sued for discrimination. The neighbor insists that the success of their ploy relies on François changing precisely nothing about his appearance: that is, he is not to act “gay.” Viewers are initially and positively surprised, judging that one needn’t be effeminate to be gay. But the scenario becomes more complicated: while the protagonist follows the instructions of his unscripted role, behaving as always before, the film’s ostensibly straight, gay-bashing counterpoint is urged by his colleague to protect his own career by becoming more sensitive to gay issues… indeed, by becoming more stereotypically “queer.” His performance is so compelling it leads everyone, including himself, to believe he actually is gay until he is institutionalized for therapy following a nervous breakdown provoked by his feelings for François. And although François himself manifests none of them, The Closet is replete with the usual suspect stereotypes linked to “queer” identity. Those in the audience who had first perceived François as a refreshing take on such misgivings of the gay “mystique” in its portrayal of human sexuality as a multifarious phenomenon are left disappointed as the other characters work to perpetuate “queer” stereotypes. Lastly, although the film is riotously funny at times, a strange sadness surrounds the lonely and only openly gay person, the neighbor for whom François and his struggle represent a vengeance or restitution of a generation in the coming.

Michael E. Lane
Appalachian State University
laneme@preffered.com