Transforming the Bodily Imaginary: the Feminist Aesthetics of Virginie Despentes

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

My PhD thesis will examine the transformational potential of the work of Virginie Despentes, tracing in her representations of deviancy a new feminist aesthetic that reconfigures the parameters of both women's bodies and women's writing. This critical study of Despentes, on whom no monograph has yet been written, will contribute to both French studies and feminist theory. Drawing on phenomenology and psychoanalysis, I will consider how Despentes' women transgress conventional modes of feminine bodily comportment, and how the subjectivity of marginal characters is paradoxically centred in her work. My proposal is that fictional representations of transgressive bodies resignify bodily norms, gradually transforming what I will term the 'bodily imaginary'.This notion of the bodily imaginary draws on Schilder (1935) and Merleau-Ponty (1945). Their works explicate how our body image is formed through individual and societal relationships, in which certain parts of the body are invested with affective and imaginative significance. Weiss (1999), and more recently Alcoff (2006) and Lennon (2019), have demonstrated that this investment is conditioned according to gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, and so on. Bodily imaginaries can thus be deeply harmful, but they remain radically open to change (Lennon, 2015). For Gatens, the imaginary body is 'socially and historically specific in that it is constructed by a shared language... and common institutional practices.' (1996: 11-12) My project here is to show that Despentes' work transforms this shared language and the imaginary it constructs. I will employ Butler's concept of resignification to elucidate the potential for acts of deviancy to reshape a norm. As such, creative work can alter the ways in which women's bodies are perceived; by reading Despentes' fiction with this in mind, I am drawing a clear connection between (extratextual) feminist politics and aesthetics.Whereas Felski proposed that we move beyond feminist aesthetics (1989), I will argue for the possibility of a new feminist aesthetics defined by bodily transgression and extremity from the turn of the 21st century. Quandt (2004) coined the term 'New French Extremity' to critique the 'shock tactics' of contemporary French cinema. I am advocating for a feminist rereading of this trend: Despentes' aesthetics are a specifically feminist endeavour in which women use their bodies to resist norms and harness creative power. Various critical studies will be informative for this conception of a new feminist aesthetics, notably Marks' The Skin of the Film (2000), Rye and Tarr's Focalizing the Body in Contemporary Women's Writing and Filmmaking in France (2006), Beugnet's Cinema and Sensation (2007), Jones' Representing Repulsion (2013) and Wilson's The Reclining Nude (2019).Overall, my project is informed by phenomenological, psychoanalytical, feminist and queer theory. Following Ahmed (2006) and Ince (2011), I am advocating not for a new methodology but rather for a renegotiation of the boundaries between these approaches, which itself reveals the potential for radical, 'politico-theoretical' readings of Despentes (Ince, 2011: 10). This project is thus intended as feminist praxis, as well as a theoretically important contribution to French studies. Benefitting from the invaluable expertise of Drs Siobhán McIlvanney and Ros Murray, my thesis is also intended as a step towards 'Despentes studies'. More can, and should, be written about an author who has so radically and consistently pushed boundaries, not only of taste and genre, but of women's bodily comportment and creative power.