Transformative Fictions in France: Futurities for Trans/Queerness in Rachilde, Céline Sciamma, and Sophie Calle
- Authors
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2024
- Source
- eScholarship - University of California
- Keywords
- Language
- English
- License
- Unknown
- External links
Abstract
This dissertation explores how twentieth- and twenty-first-century French representational works depict futurities for trans/queerness. The three primary objects – a novel, a film, and a photography project – present possibilities alternative to cis-heteropatriarchal norms. By paying critical attention to close readings and the orientation work of phenomenological objects, this dissertation finds that new possibilities for being and connecting with others emerge from disorienting encounters that reorient subjects, an insistence on prioritizing pleasure, and a capacity for invention (of new identities, relations, structures). Each chapter demonstrates how fiction may work to transform reality and how these French works encourage their audiences to enact the queer, trans, and Black life affirming worlds they envisage. The concept of “enby-futurity” is put forth and developed to describe how a belief in the power of fiction to transform the material world and an orientation towards synchronicities can grant a subject access in the here and now to glimmers of the future they long for. These French fictions offer vital strategies to effect transformation at the individual, societal, and institutional levels – proffering a timely hope to the marginalized masses.
