monique wittig the straight mind and other essays

All translations from the French in this chapter are mine unless otherwise stated. Most of these writers examine Rachilde’s troubled relationship with femininity and feminism.Ĭlaude Dauphiné, Rachilde (Paris: Mercure de France, 1991), p.

Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Cornell University Press, 1994) Īlison Finch, ‘Rachilde and the Horror of Gender Confusion’, in Women’s Writing in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. See Jennifer Birkett, The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France 1870–1914 (London and New York: Quartet, 1986) Many twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics read Rachilde’s texts as examples of women’s writing produced and consumed during a period of French history when rigid codes of gendered social behaviour obtained for men and women, and when writing was considered unfeminine. Similarly, Diana Holmes calls Rachilde ‘Butlerian avant la lettre’, but does not pursue this insight beyond her observation of the gender inversion visible in Rachilde’s novels’ titles (Diana Holmes, Rachilde: Decadence, Gender and the Woman Writer (Oxford: Berg, 2001), p. Ganz focuses mainly on Rachilde’s ‘disaggregation’ of sex and gender in Monsieur Venus to make her argument for including Rachilde in the queer French canon. Katherine Ganz has posed the question of whether a place at the table of French queer theory can be found for Rachilde in her article ‘The Difficult Guest: French Queer Theory Makes Room for Rachilde’, South Central Review, 22:31 (2005), 13–32. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Monique Wittig, ‘Paradigm’, in George Stambolian and Elaine Marks (eds), Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts, Critical Texts (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), p.

Monique wittig the straight mind and other essays