Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal, 2017
Abstract:Guillaume Dustan's autofictional Dans ma chambre unabashedly recounts the HIV positi... more Abstract:Guillaume Dustan's autofictional Dans ma chambre unabashedly recounts the HIV positive narrator-protagonist's drug-fueled navigation of Parisian gay sex culture. This essay argues that, despite the narrator's seemingly self-destructive tendencies, the novel offers a wholly life-affirming model of wellness and embodiment based on connectivity and a logic of prosthesis.
This dissertation, Deviant Sexualities: Placing Sexuality in Post-'68 French Lesbian, Gay, and Qu... more This dissertation, Deviant Sexualities: Placing Sexuality in Post-'68 French Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Literature/Politics, argues that modern French sexual minority politics, whose origins can be traced back to the student and worker uprisings of May 1968, has largely been about the making, unmaking, and remaking of space. In it, I analyze the artistic, theoretical, and activist work of four 20th-and 21st-century French figures politically invested in matters of gay, lesbian, and/or queer sexuality. Tracking the spatial configuration and logic of these thinkers' political visions brings to the fore the underappreciated ways in which post-'68 French LGBTQ thought is responsive to and conditioned by the French nation-state's foundational principle of Republican universalism. The first chapter's examination of iconic gay liberationist leader Guy Hocquenghem's activism, theory of desire, and the motif of travel in his understudied novels brings to light the "hyper-pluralistic universalism" that animates his politics. The second chapter dispels radical lesbian and materialist feminist Monique Wittig's reputation as the advocate of a parochial lesbian separatism by turning to Wittig's fiction to clarify her vision for the abolition of hetero-patriarchy called for in her essays. The third chapter elucidates the trenchant critique of Republican universalism at the heart of Guillaume Dustan's highly controversial "gay ghetto" autofiction. The fourth and final chapter addresses the emergence in the late 1990s of queer theory, culture, and politics in France and the nationalistic, anti-American overtones of its notoriously hostile reception. In it, I argue that French queer feminist performance artist, writer, and activist Wendy Delorme's work and the reactions it has inspired reveals sexual minority politics to be a site where the forces of sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, and nationalism converge. the support, encouragement, expertise, and inspiration of a number of people. First and foremost, my utmost thanks go out to my advisor, Christy Wampole, for her attentive supervision, contagious commitment to feminist scholarship, and unwavering generosity with her time, kindness and insight. It would be difficult to overstate my gratitude to Nick Nesbitt for his mentorship from my very first days on campus. During my time at Princeton, I have benefited immensely from the wisdom and critical acumen of Gayle Salamon, Wendy Belcher, Katie Chenoweth, Göran Blix, and Heather Love, whose seminar on queer and feminist method forever changed the way I approach scholarly research. I would also like to thank Lucien Nouis and Emily Apter, who fostered my appreciation for French literature and feminist theory during my undergraduate years at New York University and encouraged me to pursue graduate study.
The term ‘hormone’, which pioneering endocrinologist Ernest Starling defined as ‘the chemical mes... more The term ‘hormone’, which pioneering endocrinologist Ernest Starling defined as ‘the chemical messengers which, speeding from cell to cell along the blood stream, may coordinate the activities and growth of different parts of the body’, derives from the Greek for ‘to arouse or excite’ (Starling, 1905). In Testo Junkie: Sexe, drogue et biopolitique, philosopher and queer activist Beatriz Preciado relates her experiences and observations over a period of 236 days during which she self-administered doses of black market Testogel, a synthetic pharmaceutical androgen primarily indicated for the treatment of (cisgender) men with low testosterone, but also prescribed to female-to-male transgender hormone-replacement therapy (HRT) patients as part of a medical sex reassignment process. Testo Junkie is composed of two alternating strands, the first an explicitly autobiographical chronicle of Preciado’s illicit experiences under the effects of her experimental ‘protocole d’intoxication volontaire’ (Preciado, 2008, p. 11). The diaristic narrative elaborated in the work is punctuated by theorisation in a more overtly philosophical mode on the state of gender, sexuality, subjectivity and the body in a cultural context wherein hormonal contraceptive pills and devices, performance-enhancing drugs of various sorts, cosmetic surgeries, and countless other medical and pharmaceutical somatechnical interventions have become veritable norms.
La Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen proclaims that ‘men are born free and equa... more La Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen proclaims that ‘men are born free and equal in rights’. However, the egalitarian principles expounded in the Déclaration were translated into a constitution that defined the subjects of these rights as French propertied males at least twenty-five years of age. Entered into circulation on September 14, 1791, Olympe de Gouges's Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne stakes claim to the rights guaranteed to the universal, abstract citizen designated in the Déclaration. Much scholarship has diminished or dismissed de Gouges's work on the basis of its supposed rhetorical deficiencies. This paper, through a historically situated reading that brings to light both the ‘radical novelty’ of de Gouges's Déclaration's rhetoric and the under-appreciated intertextuality with the work of Robespierre, argues that the significance of de Gouges's Déclaration is locatable within rather than in spite of its style.
Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal, 2017
Abstract:Guillaume Dustan's autofictional Dans ma chambre unabashedly recounts the HIV positi... more Abstract:Guillaume Dustan's autofictional Dans ma chambre unabashedly recounts the HIV positive narrator-protagonist's drug-fueled navigation of Parisian gay sex culture. This essay argues that, despite the narrator's seemingly self-destructive tendencies, the novel offers a wholly life-affirming model of wellness and embodiment based on connectivity and a logic of prosthesis.
This dissertation, Deviant Sexualities: Placing Sexuality in Post-'68 French Lesbian, Gay, and Qu... more This dissertation, Deviant Sexualities: Placing Sexuality in Post-'68 French Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Literature/Politics, argues that modern French sexual minority politics, whose origins can be traced back to the student and worker uprisings of May 1968, has largely been about the making, unmaking, and remaking of space. In it, I analyze the artistic, theoretical, and activist work of four 20th-and 21st-century French figures politically invested in matters of gay, lesbian, and/or queer sexuality. Tracking the spatial configuration and logic of these thinkers' political visions brings to the fore the underappreciated ways in which post-'68 French LGBTQ thought is responsive to and conditioned by the French nation-state's foundational principle of Republican universalism. The first chapter's examination of iconic gay liberationist leader Guy Hocquenghem's activism, theory of desire, and the motif of travel in his understudied novels brings to light the "hyper-pluralistic universalism" that animates his politics. The second chapter dispels radical lesbian and materialist feminist Monique Wittig's reputation as the advocate of a parochial lesbian separatism by turning to Wittig's fiction to clarify her vision for the abolition of hetero-patriarchy called for in her essays. The third chapter elucidates the trenchant critique of Republican universalism at the heart of Guillaume Dustan's highly controversial "gay ghetto" autofiction. The fourth and final chapter addresses the emergence in the late 1990s of queer theory, culture, and politics in France and the nationalistic, anti-American overtones of its notoriously hostile reception. In it, I argue that French queer feminist performance artist, writer, and activist Wendy Delorme's work and the reactions it has inspired reveals sexual minority politics to be a site where the forces of sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, and nationalism converge. the support, encouragement, expertise, and inspiration of a number of people. First and foremost, my utmost thanks go out to my advisor, Christy Wampole, for her attentive supervision, contagious commitment to feminist scholarship, and unwavering generosity with her time, kindness and insight. It would be difficult to overstate my gratitude to Nick Nesbitt for his mentorship from my very first days on campus. During my time at Princeton, I have benefited immensely from the wisdom and critical acumen of Gayle Salamon, Wendy Belcher, Katie Chenoweth, Göran Blix, and Heather Love, whose seminar on queer and feminist method forever changed the way I approach scholarly research. I would also like to thank Lucien Nouis and Emily Apter, who fostered my appreciation for French literature and feminist theory during my undergraduate years at New York University and encouraged me to pursue graduate study.
The term ‘hormone’, which pioneering endocrinologist Ernest Starling defined as ‘the chemical mes... more The term ‘hormone’, which pioneering endocrinologist Ernest Starling defined as ‘the chemical messengers which, speeding from cell to cell along the blood stream, may coordinate the activities and growth of different parts of the body’, derives from the Greek for ‘to arouse or excite’ (Starling, 1905). In Testo Junkie: Sexe, drogue et biopolitique, philosopher and queer activist Beatriz Preciado relates her experiences and observations over a period of 236 days during which she self-administered doses of black market Testogel, a synthetic pharmaceutical androgen primarily indicated for the treatment of (cisgender) men with low testosterone, but also prescribed to female-to-male transgender hormone-replacement therapy (HRT) patients as part of a medical sex reassignment process. Testo Junkie is composed of two alternating strands, the first an explicitly autobiographical chronicle of Preciado’s illicit experiences under the effects of her experimental ‘protocole d’intoxication volontaire’ (Preciado, 2008, p. 11). The diaristic narrative elaborated in the work is punctuated by theorisation in a more overtly philosophical mode on the state of gender, sexuality, subjectivity and the body in a cultural context wherein hormonal contraceptive pills and devices, performance-enhancing drugs of various sorts, cosmetic surgeries, and countless other medical and pharmaceutical somatechnical interventions have become veritable norms.
La Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen proclaims that ‘men are born free and equa... more La Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen proclaims that ‘men are born free and equal in rights’. However, the egalitarian principles expounded in the Déclaration were translated into a constitution that defined the subjects of these rights as French propertied males at least twenty-five years of age. Entered into circulation on September 14, 1791, Olympe de Gouges's Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne stakes claim to the rights guaranteed to the universal, abstract citizen designated in the Déclaration. Much scholarship has diminished or dismissed de Gouges's work on the basis of its supposed rhetorical deficiencies. This paper, through a historically situated reading that brings to light both the ‘radical novelty’ of de Gouges's Déclaration's rhetoric and the under-appreciated intertextuality with the work of Robespierre, argues that the significance of de Gouges's Déclaration is locatable within rather than in spite of its style.
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