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10.4000/trans.5211

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DOI: <

10.4000/trans.5211

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‘The gang Straights impose their anomalies’: three feminist stories to undermine the norm (Rochefort, Wittig, Yvon)

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of the literary anomaly as manifested in three feminist texts published in the early 1970s in France and Quebec (Archaos ou le jardin étincelant by Christiane Rochefort, 1972; The Lesbian Body by Monique Wittig, 1973; Filles-commandos bandées by Josée Yvon, 1976). Anomaly is both a theme of writing and a formal manifestation of the questions it raises: the authors talk about it and experience it directly, confronting readers with hybrid texts that cannot be grasped by any stable literary or ideological norm. In Christiane Rochefort's parody of an anarchist utopia, joyful and lively, the establishment of anarchy has a revealing power: women discover the concept of rape, which turns out to be a monstrosity that women will begin to challenge and refuse. In The Lesbian Body, a collection of love fragments halfway between erotic and horrific narrative, the writing of lesbianism and of female bodies, and in particular of the organic body, is immediately placed as an incongruity in relation to the traditional canon: it is both an anomaly – a literary hapax – and an abnormality, not only unexpected but rejected in principle by conventional values of literature. In Josée Yvon's text, a long and nervous poem about women’s violence, the choices of an aggressive writing and of a revolutionary terrorist ideology also question the "other" of the normal, of moral standards – or, as Wittig would later also say, of the "straight". For the three authors, the permanent staging of moral and literary subversion prevents meaning from taking hold, ideology from incubating, and writing thus opens up new revolutionary possibilities. Anomaly plays several roles: it philosophically questions the notions of norm and anomaly, it has a heuristic power that allows it to reveal the power of social norms that are usually hidden, and it shakes them by profoundly renewing the political meaning of literary creation.

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