Responsables de l’atelier
Amy WELLS (Université de Caen Normandie)
Margaret GILLESPIE (Université Marie et Louis Pasteur)
ADOUARD Alexandre, École Normale Supérieure, alexandre.adouard@gmail.com
Trans and gender non-conforming representations on US television: towards queer emancipation through rehashed TV shows?
In Alternate Channels: The Uncensored Story of Gay and Lesbian Images on Radio and Television, Steven Capsuto notes that “in America, broadcasting wields a power once reserved for religion; the power to tell people what is real” (Capsuto 2000, 1) For much of America’s television history, this power rendered transgender and gender non-conforming lives either invisible or reducible to marginal, pathologized figures reminiscent of Judith Butler’s concept of “precarious lives” (Butler 2020). If “Genderqueer identities are diverse but share dis-identification with rigid gender binaries and in some cases, a direct challenge to the social institutions that perpetuate binaries” (Monro 2019, 126), are recent examples of genderqueer characters on US television proof that this institution is indeed evolving past binaries? This paper examines how recent developments in televisual form— in particular, reboots, revivals, and the advent of streaming platforms—have begun to unsettle these constraints and contribute to emerging modes of queer emancipation.
Focusing on a corpus of queer-coded or explicitly queer drama series that have been revived or
reimagined, this study analyses how retelling familiar narratives enables new forms of gender
representation. Revised texts under scrutiny include Pose (as a fictionalized rewriting of Paris Is Burning), the 2019 Tales of the City revival, The L Word: Generation Q, And Just Like That…, and the 2022 American reboot of Queer as Folk. Through these “repetitions with variation” (Hutcheon 2006, xxiv), the paper interrogates the narrative, aesthetic, and ideological shifts that attend these updated versions: Why return to these stories now? How do reboots and revivals reconfigure genre conventions to include trans, nonbinary, and gender-non-conforming subjectivities? How do they intend to remain truthful to the ur-text (and possibly ur-audiences) while deeply altering it to justify their existence and reflect societal changes?
Finally, the paper questions the sociopolitical reach of these representations. While streaming
services have enabled more nuanced portrayals, their segmented audiences and algorithm-driven approach to mass consumption limit broader cultural impact—an ambivalence recently
underscored by Traci Abbott, who reminds us that increased visibility “is hardly guaranteed” to
advance trans rights amidst intensifying culture wars in the US (Abbott 2022, 228). By mapping
these contradictions, the paper situates televisual rehashing as both a site of queer possibility
and an indicator of its limits.
Abbott, Traci B. 2022. The History of Trans Representation in American Television and Film Genres. Palgrave Macmillan.
Blanco-Fernández, Vítor, Ṣikemi Akinmade, et María T. Soto-Sanfiel. 2025. « Representation of Young Non-Binary Characters in Mainstream Fiction ». Archives of Sexual Behavior 54 (3):1199-215. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-024-03074-2.
Butler, Judith. 2020. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Radical Thinkers.
Verso.
Capsuto, Steven. 2000. Alternate Channels: The Uncensored Story of Gay and Lesbian Images on Radio and Television. 1. ed. Ballantine Books.
Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge.https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203957721.
Monro, Surya. 2019. « Non-Binary and Genderqueer: An Overview of the Field ». International Journal of Transgenderism 20 (2-3): 126-31. https://doi.org/10.1080/15532739.2018.1538841.
AUPERIN Claire, CY Cergy Paris Université, claire.auperin@cyu.fr
“Emancipation in Print? The National Council of Jewish Women and the Quest for an Official Organ (1893-1921)”
When the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) was born in 1893, it aimed to represent all Jewish women in the United States and give them a unified voice in social, religious and educational matters. Following the model of other national women’s organizations, the women of the Council considered publishing a national paper to serve as their official organ. Having an organ edited by and for them could represent a tremendous opportunity for American Jewish women to take control of their representation and to showcase a united front despite the vast differences – geographical, religious and social – separating them. But no such organ appeared until 1921.
This talk will focus on how the NCJW struggled in its early years to publish a national organ of its own. By focusing on archival material such as the early discussions of the Executive Board meetings and the proceedings of the Triennial conventions, I will see how prominent the issue of the official organ was between 1893 and 1921, despite historians often dismissing the importance of such publications.
For the NCJW, as well as for other women’s organizations, publishing an official organ was a matter of both dignity and respectability. It allowed the editors, writers and leaders of the Council to be in control of the discourse being produced about them, instead of having to rely on the goodwill of the traditionally business-minded press. In that context, official organs were seen as emancipatory for the women at their helm. But discussions surrounding budgetary limitations and a lack of a unified policy delayed the emergence of the providential paper for the NCJW. While in theory the publication of an organ was freeing for American Jewish women, the reality of publishing and inner leadership divisions hindered the emancipatory power of the elusive official organ.
BELLIARD Corinne M. Université d’Evry, c.m.belliard@wanadoo.fr
« Beatrice Potter-Webb (1858-1943) : Ses idées sur l’émancipation »
Mon projet consiste à s’interroger sur la façon dont Beatrice Potter-Webb (1858-1943) conçoit l’émancipation dans les cahiers de son journal intime (Diary) tenu pendant soixante seize ans. Fille d’un industriel, élevée dans les cercles intellectuels et libéraux, co-autrice avec son mari de nombreux articles et ouvrages sur l’histoire sociale et politique de la Grande-Bretagne, icône du socialisme, elle utilise plus d’une vingtaine de fois le terme d’émancipation, l’adjectif émancipé ou tout simplement le verbe émanciper. L’idée d’émancipation court tout au long de son journal.
Une première approche permet de constater que sa conception de l’émancipation telle qu’elle apparaît dans son Diary est diverse, riche et variée. Beatrice Potter-Webb emploie le plus souvent le concept, au fil de la plume, à des groupes sociaux voire à des peuples dont elle mesure la diversité : les minorités, les Indiens, les hommes politiques, les serfs, les Soviétiques, les enfants, les musulmanes, les Turcs, les paysans, les Allemands, les Polonais, les indigènes, les Égyptiens, les femmes célibataires. Elle l’applique plus rarement à elle-même ou à des individus.
Outre la multiplicité de l’emploi du mot émancipation, la question est de savoir si Beatrice Potter-Webb a une opinion définitive sur ce que sont les actes, les discours et les pratiques émancipatrices ? Propose-t-elle une définition au sens du dictionnaire Larousse « action de s’affranchir d’un lien, d’une entrave, d’une domination, d’un préjugé » ? Est-elle une grande théoricienne de l’émancipation ? En définitive, qu’est-ce qu’une britannique ou une société émancipée pour une femme qui se réclame du socialisme ?
La notion « d’émancipation » sera ici abordée d’un point de vue historique afin d’enrichir les débats sur l’émancipation politique des femmes.
Mots clés : femme, émancipation, socialisme, exotisme
BERNARD Giselle, European University Institute, Giselle.BERNARD@eui.eu
Urania (1916-1940): An Orientalist Collage for Queer Emancipation
The British periodical Urania was edited by an eclectic collective comprising women’s rights and trade union activists, a Montessori educator, animal welfare activist and a lawyer. The editors converged around a commitment to feminist and queer politics which began in suffragism but looked beyond, into transforming gender and sexuality norms. Urania was committed “to ignore the dual organization of humanity” into ‘men’ and ‘women’. It was particularly critical of one consequence of this dual organisation: heterosexual norms and their assumption of complementarity between neatly differentiated genders. To this, Urania opposed positive accounts of queer love and destabilised binary and fixed gender categories by featuring stories of androgyny and gender transitions.
Urania promoted this vision through a complex collage of reprints from British, English language press outlets from, notably, India and Japan, translated pieces and original pieces. In so doing, the periodical became a forum for different voices across the world and, especially, across the British empire – though these different voices had uneven presences and were ultimately mediated by British editors. Scholarship on Urania has focused on its queer dimensions, but little explored its entanglements with empire – though these are central in Urania’s formulation of feminist critiques of Western sexological science and utopian aspirations to overcome cisheteronormativity.
I will ask how British queer women’s own positionality as sexually othered subjects within an imperial metropole contributed to inflecting Orientalism and Western scientific categories, opening possibilities for new self-understandings and encounters which challenged binary and hierarchical mappings of the world. Urania’s Orientalist queer contents and their (uneven) global circulations suggest intimate links between the written word, fantasies, theories and embodied experiences of sexual dissidence. The disorientations introduced in the Orientalist and heteronormative scripts, I will argue, opened spaces for identification between different ‘others’, and for queer desires and subjectivities to become conceivable.
Baker, Dallas. Queer Life Writing as Self-Making. Edited by Donna Lee Brien and Quinn Eades. UWA Publishing, 2018. https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/products/offshoot-contemporary-life-writing-methodologies-and-practice.
Funke, Jana. ‘Lesbian-Trans-Feminist Modernism and Sexual Science: Irene Clyde and Urania’. In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism, edited by Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan. Routledge, 2023.
Lewis, Reina. ‘Sapphism and the Seraglio: Reflections on the Queer Female Gaze and Orientalism’. In Orientalism, Eroticism and Modern Visuality in Global Cultures, edited by Julie Codell and Joan DelPlato. Routledge, 2016. https://www.routledge.com/Orientalism-Eroticism-and-Modern-Visuality-in-Global-Cultures/DelPlato-Codell/p/book/9781409463955.
Marhoefer, Laurie. Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love. University of Toronto Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487532741.
Melman, Billie. Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918, Sexuality, Religion and Work. Palgrave Macmillan, 1992.
Oram, Alison. ‘Feminism, Androgyny and Love between Women in Urania, 1916-1940’. Media History 7, no. 1 (2001): 57-70. https://doi.org/10.1080/1368800120048245.
HOARAU Raphael, Université de la Réunion, hoarauraphael11@gmail.com, 38003349@co.univ-reunion.fr
Voguing et construction identitaire : performance, corps et intersectionnalité dans la culture ballroom
Cette communication propose une analyse anthropologique du Voguing au sein de la culture ballroom, en l’abordant comme un processus de production identitaire, de performativité, de résistance et de revendication. Né dans les années 1970, par et pour des communautés afro-latines queer, le voguing intègre des influences diasporiques multiples (breakdance, capoeira, jazz, ballet). Plus qu’un simple style de danse, le Voguing apparaît comme un dispositif permettant aux participant-es de détourner, (re)signifier et de s’émanciper des normes de genre, de race1, de sexualité et de classe. S’appuyant sur une méthodologie qualitative, la recherche combine (1) une analyse chorégraphique des principales formes du Voguing (Old Way, New Way, Vogue Fem), (2) l’examen d’archives visuelles issues de bals filmés entre les années 1980 et aujourd’hui, (3) l’étude ethnographique secondaire à partir de travaux existants (Bailey, Jackson, Peranda), et (4) une lecture attentive des discours produits par les danseurs eux-mêmes. Cette approche permet d’observer les manières dont les danseurs mobilisent leur corps comme outil narratif et politique.
L’analyse met en lumière la façon dont les cinq éléments canoniques du Voguing (catwalk, duckwalk, spins and dips, et floor performance) agissent comme un marqueur sémiotique des revendications identitaires. Le Voguing se doit également d’être analysé en lien avec les catégories genrées de la ballroom (Butch Queens, Femme Queens, etc) qui orientent la manière dont les danseurs performent masculinité, féminité ou ambivalence, à l’intersection de trajectoires raciales, sexuelles et sociales. L’argument principal défendu est que le Voguing n’agit pas uniquement comme chorégraphie stylisée mais comme un processus actif de production identitaire. Les bals fournissent alors un cadre sécurisant où ces identités peuvent être créées, expérimentées, jouées, ajustées et réinvesties dans la vie quotidienne de ces pratiquants.
Bailey, Marlon M. Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture
in Detroit. University of Michigan Press, 2013.
Becquer, Jean-Philippe. « Voguing and the Politics of Performance ». Journal of Dance and
Culture, vol. 12, no. 2, 2018.
Jackson, Naomi. “Diasporic Practices in Ballroom Dance.” Dance Research Journal, 2015.
Peranda, Jarrod. “Embodied Memory in Vogue Performance.” Performance Matters, vol. 4,
no. 1, 2018.
Tucker, Martez. Voices of the Ballroom. House of Vogue Press, 2020.
MISSET June, Université Polytechnique des Hauts-de-France, jpmisset@gmail.com,
Emancipation as Queer Possibility in British Domestic Novels (1778-1815)
The domestic novel, while largely defined by its centering of female subjectivity, is not particularly known for any ties to a revolutionary or emancipatory impulse. The typical narrative trajectory in these novels culminates in the genteel female protagonist’s union in marriage with a suitably wealthy gentleman. Nevertheless, some novels which fall under the definition of a domestic novel – that is to say, a novel « based upon a plot of courtship that makes explicit some of the text’s central lessons, » according to Lisa Wood (2003) – defy this trajectory and offer queer possibilities beyond the heteronormative framework which structures the genre. This talk proposes to analyze Lady Mary Hamilton’s Munster Village (1778) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798) and the ways in which they present forms of homoerotic female utopia. I will suggest that both texts offer an emancipatory way out of heteronormativity, which plays out in the plot as much as in the form of these novels, carving out a queer space within an otherwise highly normative literary genre
OLLIVARY Marine, Université de Caen, marine.ollivary@unicaen.fr
Emancipating medieval women: a presentist approach to the past in the 21st century?
The writing of biographies of women has always been a popular genre of historical writing, from the Strickland sisters Lives of the Queens of England to Elizabeth Norton’s She Wolves. They remain, in the 21st century, a popular form that allows its authors to reassess the place of women in past societies.
In the case of medieval women, this study focuses on noble women. The subjects studied have therefore often taken public roles that do not match with the ideal of the domestic medieval woman developed by the chivalric ideal of XIXth century England, from leading armies to being regents. That transgression from the idealized norm is often depicted as a lifelong process of emancipation from the gendered ideal which sets the subject apart from the norm of her era.
However, the study of history reveals a wide range of public and political roles associated with women throughout the medieval period. We are therefore left to wonder whether the process of emancipation depicted in these biographies reflects the actual process of emancipation undertaken by medieval women or an ideal of emancipation for women of the past rooted in 21st century’s perceptions of medieval women and their roles.
Therefore, we will aim to question both the depiction of emancipation of medieval women and its potential presentist roots, which will place our study in the following axes of study: “Questioning or “queering” conventional tropes of emancipation” and “LGBTQIA+ and women’s life writing as gender emancipation”.
The study of the representation of all medieval women in the XXIst century would be too big for a single paper, however. Therefore, we will focus on the representation of two queens who are often depicted as emancipated women: Emma of Normandy, queen of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of France and England.
OTTAVINO Elise, University of Western Ontario, eottavin@uwo.ca,
The linguistic limits of the (gendered) body in Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s Rocket Fantastic
This paper explores the dual emancipation from traditional gender and genre in American poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s 2017 poetry collection, Rocket Fantastic. Among the various characters presented in the poems, the recurring figure of “the Bandleader,” an embodiment of the poetic speaker’s inner desires, stands out by appearing in fairly explicit poems through a pronoun that defies gender binaries. Instead of the neutral “they,” Calvocoressi chooses to use a musical symbol known as dal segno, usually added on sheet music to indicate when a part has to be repeated. Throughout the collection, the poems on the Bandleader echo each others and read as variations of the same ever changing text which questions and reinvents both gender norms in the intimate sphere and generic conventions. As the relationship between the speaker and the Bandleader is further explored, the limits of language are subverted beyond the simple use of a new pronoun. Through linguistic experimentation, the bodies of the two characters mingle and are constantly recreated. At the border between printed font and drawing, the sign for dal segno represents, according to the poet themself, “a confluence of genders in varying degrees, not either/or nor necessarily both in equal measure. It is simultaneously encompassing and fluctuating, pronounced by [the poet] with the intake of breath when a body is unlimited in its possibilities” (xi). In that sense, Rocket Fantastic not only overcomes the limits of the gendered body but also attempts to transcend its physicality.
RICKARD Matthew, Université d’Amiens, mathew.rickard@u-picardie.fr,
Queer(y)ing Rural Emancipation: Covert Desire, Masculine Constraint and Sexual Violence in Édouard Louis’ En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (2014) and Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo (2022)
Axiomatic narratives of queer emancipation have often focused on the rise of the urban space as a haven for non-normative identities and sexualities to exist openly. However, while rural working-class spaces are often considered to restrict male sexual freedom, they also paradoxically produce covert same-sex desire and violence as a result of this restriction. Through close readings of Édouard Louis’ En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (2014), Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo (2022), and drawing on Tony Silva’s Still Straight (2021), this paper will explore how heteronormative rural environments distort the expression of queer desire into ‘downlow’ practices marked by coercion, shame, and internalized homophobia. Both protagonists experience male sexual violence in their rural settings – the countryside of Picardy and a highland loch – and queer joy in an urban setting – the cities of Amiens and Glasgow – and yet the opposite is also true for each of them. Equally, while the novels present us with brutal examples of downlow culture, Silva’s sociological study of MSM (men who have sex with other men, regardless of how they ‘officially’ identify) often hinges on consent, however covert. By interrogating the intersection of class, gender, and space, this paper blurs the traditional linear model of an urban, queer emancipation from a repressed, rural locus. Indeed, while both novels illustrate both constraint and freedom within economically deprived spaces where a form of hegemonic masculinity dominates, the protagonists’ exposure to urbane, economically affluent locations does not ensure their emancipation. As such, this paper argues that by queer(y)ing emancipation more broadly, we begin to see it as a complex negotiation rather than a simple progression.
ROLLAND Barthélémy, École Normale Supérieure, barth.rolland@gmail.com
“Who was Mary Shelley?”: Lorine Niedecker on Women’s Emancipation Through Writing
In the poem “Who was Mary Shelley?” from Homemade Poems and Handmade Poems (1964), which were gift-books for Cid Corman, Jonathan Williams, and Louis Zukofsky that were published later, Niedecker reflects on the links between women writers, posterity, and marriage. As a woman writer herself who had just remarried less than a year earlier, she wonders: “Who was Mary Shelley? / What was her name / before she married?” (Collected Works, 212). Although “Mary was Frankestein’s creator” (CW, 213), Niedecker seems to argue that she was mostly remembered for the famous anecdote on the nights spent with Byron and Percy Shelley rather than for her auctoriality. Niedecker’s questions are also imbued with irony because it is common knowledge that Mary’s mother was none other than Mary Wollstonecraft, and point out the struggle for women’s emancipation from men. In fact, Niedecker’s association between gender and literary authority is already heralded in her defining poem “Poet’s work” where writing is both an act of resistance against men’s prerogatives and an alchemical craft, materialised by a neologism: “Grandfather / advised me: / Learn a trade // I learned / to sit at desk / and condense // No layoff / from this / condensery” (CW, 194). Niedecker’s emancipation
as a woman is achieved through a form of art rather than a “trade” and advocates for an anticapitalist means of emancipation that could transcend class, and gender issues.
Thus, I would like to explore how trades, crafts, and works operate in Niedecker’s poetry and how they bring to the fore women writers’ struggle for emancipation in the patriarchal and capitalistic society of the US in the second half of the 20th century.
Lemardeley, Marie-Christine. « Property, Poverty, Poetry: Lorine Niedecker’s Quiet
Revelations ». EREA, 2007, pp 7-13. Retrieved http://journals.openedition.org/erea/174
Mickenberg Julia. “From Factory to Home? The Crisis in the Gendered Division of Labor.”
American Literature in Transition: 1940-1950. Edited by Christopher Vials. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 178-192.
Niedecker, Lorine. Collected Works. Edited by Jenny Penbertby. Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2002.
Blau Duplessis, Rachel. “Lorine Niedecker, the Anonymous: Gender, Class, Genre and
Resistances.” The Kenyon Review, 1992, pp. 96-116
ROUTLEDGE Tom, Aix-Marseille Université, tom.ROUTLEDGE@univ-amu.fr
Fluid Voices & Radical Spaces: Kae Tempest and Queer Emancipation in British Rap
This paper explores the contribution of spoken-word artist and rapper Kae Tempest to re-thinking British rap music, and how Tempest’s works, words and presence in this sphere challenge societal norms. Tempest, who now uses the pronouns he/him, has been a long-standing advocate for the queer community and marginalised people. While rap has long been a platform for marginalised voices to express emancipatory ideas, it can also perpetuate harmful stereotypes, such as misogyny and homophobia, often promoted – consciously and unconsciously – by male-dominated subcultures within the genre (Herd, 2014). In contrast, female and non-binary artists in rap have regularly used the genre to resist such limitations, offering alternative narratives that challenge patriarchal structures and racial hierarchies (Ghio, 2020 & Qureshi, 2021). Tempest’s most recent album Self Titled (2025) is an example of how the artist’s work queers the space of rap. Tempest’s spoken-word cadence, fluid identity, and rejection of hyper-masculine posturing carve out a space where vulnerability becomes power. By centring emotional honesty, collective struggle, and the instability of the self, Tempest transforms rap into a site of radical openness, occupying spaces they were not intended to inhabit – a concept that Sara Ahmed explores in Queer Phenomenology (2006). This queering of space resists fixed, patriarchal and heteronormative categories, and invites listeners to inhabit diversity and acceptance. In doing so, the album becomes a form of emancipation: it frees both artist and audience from the conventional norms, and pushes back against the erasure of marginalised voices within both mainstream and underground rap communities (Qureshi, 2021), offering a model of legitimacy rooted in fluid, liberated expression.
SCHWALLER Pauline, Université de Lorraine, pauline.schwaller@univ-lorraine.fr
Women Characters of Greek Mythology on the Long Road to Emancipation
Feminist revisionist mythmaking is a flourishing phenomenon on the anglophone literary scene, which consists in recasting forgotten or marginalised women characters from Greek mythology in main protagonists of contemporary novels. These characters can thus be emancipated from both the epic form, which relegated them in the background, and from the male characters, in whose shadows they used to dwell. If this emancipation can be seen as progressive throughout centuries of rewritings of the same myths, women mythological characters seem to have failed to gain their complete emancipation from their male counterparts in our collective imagination. This paper aims at seeing how the perception of such characters has evolved throughout time, from Ancient Greece to present day; how they first became archetypes in our imagination; and how contemporary rewritings can help them break free from these archetypal boxes they are confined in. It will briefly discuss the cases of Clytemnestra, the terrible husband killer (or powerful monarch), of Psyche, the sleeping beauty (or Herculean hero), of Atalanta, the forgotten outcast (or valiant and proud huntress), of Circe, the seductress and wicked witch (or powerful goddess), and of the Amazons, the men killers (or free warrior women). Each of these characters has had a chance at emancipation at one point in history. However, these attempts proved quite vain since our perception of most of them did not durably change. Contemporary revisionist mythmaking seems to offer them a second chance at emancipation. This paper will discuss whether these new and improved characters are completely emancipated or whether their emancipation is still limited by the binary system in which they were created.
SWEET, Anne, L’École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, acsweet@orange.fr
Feminist Sexuality and Sensibilities Liberated on Screen: Provocations and Transgressions in the Works of UK Filmmaker Emerald Fennell
“Being a female filmmaker is a feminist action. And it’s become more and more apparent as I
go on how much of a feminist act it is, whether you like it or not,” the UK actor, producer and director Emerald Fennell has been quoted as saying. In an increasingly anti-woke and anti-feminist cultural environment, Fennell particularly stands out as being “rebellious,” “political,” and truly provocative.
This talk will, thus, examine the ways in which Fennell pushes boundaries and transgresses societal “norms” to both critique and shock society, as well as the possible readings and interpretations of works created by a self-purported feminist filmmaker.
The first of these films, A Promising Young Woman (LuckyChap (sic.) Entertainment, 2020), features a woman getting revenge for the rape and suicide of her friend by punishing those she feels are responsible, and is often widely considered to be a “feminist” work. Then, there is Saltburn (Prime Video, 2023), which is known for its LGBTQIA+ representations. Its main character, Oliver, a “scholarship student,” notably feels and expresses desire for both men and women. The film is a send-up of upper-class British society and the elitism of Fennell’s former university, Oxford. It created buzz and controversy for its violence—as it slowly descends into abject horror—and for sexual content that could be considered as transgressive, including necrophilia, sex during menstruation, a certain scene involving bath water, and a man dancing, whilst appearing fully naked without actually wearing a prosthetic (and the latter is apparently rare enough in Hollywood to merit multiple news articles, including one in the LGBTQIA+ publication The Advocate).
One can be left in almost no doubt as to the existence of the “female gaze” in hands of this female director, as there are many close-ups on young men’s faces, and their denuded bodies are important visual objects and spectacles. The focus of the main male character’s obsessive desire is a man called Felix, played by Jacob Elordi. In terms of this choice of actor, it is of note that Elordi is also an important object of internet users’ gazes, in addition to that of another significant female filmmaker: He was partly chosen by Sofia Coppola to play Elvis in her film Priscilla (Fremantle, 2023) based on women’s attraction to him. He also blurs gender lines in his star persona. Not only has he played various LGBTQIA+ characters, including in the series Euphoria (HBO, 2019-), where his character serves as a critique of “toxic masculinity,” but he also, at times, wears “feminine” garments, and is also well known for carrying a “purse” and being a representative of the new “sensitive” Gen Z form of manhood.
Yet he will play the cruel, romantic anti-hero Heathcliff in Fennell’s third and most recent film, Wuthering Heights (MRC, 2026), based on one of the most famous books written by a female author of all time (Emily Brontë, 1847). The film, which will be released on Valentine’s Day, will not only explicitly display female desire, but it will also contain very graphic BDSM, something which Fennell argues could always be envisioned as part of the original “sadomasochistic,” “primal and sexual” narrative—her idea being to recreate the “desire” she felt reading the book.
In press articles and on the internet, people wonder if this time Fennell has truly gone too far? Shock value? Commercial value? True feminism? An expression of her “gaze” and her desire? One thing that is certain is that her films create conversations around gender and sexuality in an increasingly saturated media environment where the “manosphere” has been countering decades of feminism. Thus, Fennell’s messages and intentions would seem to be important, in terms of both feminist and LGBTQIA+ representations, and to academic study.
Creed, Barbara, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, London, Routledge, 1997(1993).
Mulvey, Laura “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, 1 Oct 1975 : 6-18.
TERNISIEN Camille, Université de Lorraine, ternisiencamille@gmail.com
The linguistic construction of non-binary and trans identities on Reddit
The aim of this study is to determine the ways in which individual speakers or groups from the queer community use specific linguistic markers to establish, share and consolidate their individual or collective social identity. More specifically, the focus will be on non-binary and/or trans communities, and how they navigate the notions of labels, passing, performance and self- vs. perceived image.
Can we identify recurring linguistic patterns in these speakers’ discourse about identity? These could be specific linguistic markers, lexical neologisms, as well as discursive strategies.
To answer this question, we will explore Reddit, a “social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website” (Medvedev et al 2017:184) which consists of over 138,000 communities. Subreddits dedicated to the trans community (such as r/Trans) provide spaces for members to exchange advice and share personal experiences about transitioning.
Preliminary data collection (selecting the most recent posts) highlights a few prominent features:
– neologisms such as “transbiens”, “femboy”, “mpreg”,
– acronyms such as “AGAB”, “AFAB”,“AMAB”, “FTM”,“MTF”, “TW”,
– metalinguistic discourse: “chaser (someone who is attracted to trans women)”, “Can we stop
with the omnipresent transfem/transmasc”?
– questions: “I came out […], what now?”, “What if …?”,
– the semantic field of fear “scared”, “worried”, “nervous”,
– the following lexemes linked to a perceived identity: “to pass”, “to be read as”, “to assume”,
– the expression of wishing something was known or done before,
– asking for advice/help: “Shoud I …?”, “any advice welcome”,
– sharing a problem/feeling: “I don’t know what to do”,
– the large presence of the pronoun “I” followed by a BE+ V-ING form,
– more generally, the notions of transphobia/stigma, body dysphoria, misgendering, coming out,
etc.
The next steps will consist in selecting specific data dealing with the notions of identity, labels, image,etc. and extracting it into a concordancer to investigate whether particular linguistic patterns appear and what they reveal about the trans and non-binary community discourse.
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WELLS Amy, Université de Caen, amy.wells@unicaen.fr
Robin Vote: A Gender-Emancipating Character
WOODS Kathryn, University of Bristol, kathryn.woods@bristol.ac.uk
Translation as Gender Emancipation?
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette and Willa Cather’s narratives of sexual and gender dissidence are routinely confined to the historical contexts in which they were produced. Both born in 1873, their writings of migration and displacement are methods of enacting meaning. In the case of Colette’s La Vagabonde (1910), the archetype of the vagabond (a traditionally aimless and disillusioned figure) becomes dynamic and assertive. For Cather in My Ántonia (1918), the archetype of the pioneer is recast as nomadic and introspective, even backward-looking.
La Vagabonde was translated as The Vagrant by Charlotte Remfry-Kidd in 1912, The Vagabond by Enid McLeod in 1954, and The Vagabond by Stanley Appelbaum in 2010. Just this September, a new translation – Frances Egan’s The Vagabond – has just been published, bringing the total to four. My Ántonia was first translated into French as Mon Ántonia by Victor Llona in 1924, followed by Blaise Allan’s Mon Amie Antonia in 1967, and finally the 1993 version by Robert Ruard.
These seven translations not only span a large part of the twentieth century but also extend into the present day. By studying certain extracts of both novels alongside their English and French translations, my paper asks what happens when Colette and Cather’s work is moved across languages and cultural contexts, and how the words themselves take on new connotations. How is queer desire and gender nonconformism interpreted by each of the translators? In what ways does their writing deepen Colette and Cather’s own critical examination of the self as mobile in dialogue with others? I will consider translation as an alternative and emancipatory method of queer writing while also acknowledging pitfalls – including the ways in which translation problematises queer formulations of the self and engages in acts of omission and censorship.