Frontières de l’humain et technologies de genre monstrueux
This article uses queer theory (Butler, Preciado, Halberstam) to analyse Dennis Cooper's The Marble Swarm, and shows how that the novel reveals the mechanisms of edification of sexual norms. In fact, Cooper's novel questions the link between gender and monster: the monster, just as gender,...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | fra |
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Association Genres, sexualités, langage
2019-12-01
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| Series: | Glad! |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/glad/1691 |
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| Summary: | This article uses queer theory (Butler, Preciado, Halberstam) to analyse Dennis Cooper's The Marble Swarm, and shows how that the novel reveals the mechanisms of edification of sexual norms. In fact, Cooper's novel questions the link between gender and monster: the monster, just as gender, is exhibited as a cultural and discursive production, through the exploration of the sexual and cultural devices that produce it. The monster who narrates the novel is built at the intersection of socially prohibited economic, racial and criminal behaviors and sexual desires, which compose his fictional abjection. The novel therefore testifies to some important changes in the contemporary imagination surrounding the monster. According to Halberstam in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, contemporary fictional incarnations of monsters herald a change in the representation of the figure. When the Victorian monster embodied everything that threatened the dominant culture in order to protect it, the contemporary monster is characterized by its proximity to the human and to the norm. Thus, the narrator/monster of The Marble Swarm functions as a narrative instrument that criticises dominant culture rather than strengthening it. The monster and its actions are made possible thanks to the over-permissive, marginal space the wealthy narrator was born into. The Marble Swarm rather than offering a stable model of the monstrous coins a generative conception of it similar to the Butlerian concept of gender. Cooper’s monster is the result of a manufacturing process that establishes it as such in both the diegesis and the text. Through the same strategy, the novel threatens the once stable limits of the monstrous: one is not born but rather becomes a monster, and no one is safe from this becoming-monster that haunts The Marble Swarm. Not even the reader. |
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| ISSN: | 2551-0819 |