Undoing Gender in French Literature

The French modernist canon has been read has a key site for sexual dissidence, but what about gender? In this talk, Mat Fournier presents his book, Dysphoric Modernism, and questions the entanglements of the modern gender binary with state power and colonial history. Through readings of Gide, Genet, Colette, and others, Fournier explores how narratives of sexual dissidence both deconstruct and reinforce mutually exclusive definitions of masculinity and femininity and racial discriminations. In this web of contradictions, modern gender appears as inherently dysphoric, imposing untenable positions and perpetuating systemic hierarchies. Ultimately, tracking the dysphoria traversing modernist writings offers a perspective into gender’s complicity with historical and contemporary fascisms, and offers strategies of resistance.