TRANSGENDER PRACTICES IN THE MODERN AND POSTMODERN NOVEL: TRANSVESTITES AND TRANSVESTISM IN OUR-LADY-OF-THE-FLOWERS BY JEAN GENET, HELL HAS NO LIMITS BY JOSÉ DONOSO, MY TENDER MATADOR BY PEDRO LEMEBEL AND LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN BY HUBERT SELBY JR. ; PRATIQUES TRANSGENRES DANS LE ROMAN MODERNE ET POST...
In a world governed by gender binarity, literature tends to represent and stage characters fin binary terms. But what happens when a novelist decides to center his/her story around a dissident of gender? Starting from this question, our research strives to question transgender practices in the modern novel and, for one of the texts in the corpus at least, in postmodernity through an examination of Our Lady Of The Flowers from Jean Genet (1943) to My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel (2001) through Hell Has No Limits by José Donoso (1966) and Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. (1964). If the nodal point of these four works is indeed the representation of transgender practices (clothing, gestures, artistic performances), these works also question trans materialities, i.e. the way in which the body modulates and models itself in light of the twists that it is subjected to. In three of the works in this corpus, the queer body is a senescent body, so queer aging is tinged with a morbidity that we must place in a specific historical context. If the third age intersects with the third sex, it is perhaps a way of signifying the unlivable nature of queer materialities – and identities. The transvestite body is first of all an impossible body. But from occupied France to Pinochet's Chile, the transvestite body not only embodies transgender and homosexual morbidity but also the decay of a world structured by the binary distribution of the sexes. In each of the novels, drag should not be read as an intimate practice but as an irreducibly political one. The transvestite, like it or not, is saying something about the polis. In more than one way, it embodies the disguise of all, a universal social truth. By focusing on the practices and performances of a dissident of gender – Divine in Genet, la Manuela in Donoso, Georgette in Selby Jr. and la Loca del frente in Lemebel –, the authors are primarily interested in the way in which their drag radiates on their audience, on the decaying social body that welcomes them – and ...