Estudio queer de la narrativa francesa del siglo XXIel género no binario en la trilogía Les Porteurs de Cat Kueva
- Reynier Gómez, José
- Pedro Salvador Méndez Robles Director
Defence university: Universidad de Murcia
Fecha de defensa: 14 June 2024
- Encarnación Medina Arjona Chair
- Elena Meseguer Paños Secretary
- José Luis Arráez Llobregat Committee member
Type: Thesis
Abstract
The main aim of this doctoral thesis is to test whether contemporary French narrative is echoing the ideas on gender identity and sexual orientation supported by queer theories and, more particularly, whether it is reflecting the existence of people identifying as non-binary. As a corpus of work, Cat Kueva's trilogy Les Porteurs has been selected, as it addresses themes related to gender and sexual diversity issues. For this reason, the aim of the study is to verify whether the current queer ideas have, in some way, inspired this trilogy. To achieve this, the research will begin with a study of queer theories and their importance as a precursor to numerous identities, including non-binary gender. The literary works of French writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Monique Wittig or Michel Foucault served as inspiration for the development of current queer ideas defended, among other authors, by Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. By rejecting the gender essentialism that establishes sex as the identifier of gender, queer theories allow new identities to exist outside the male/female binarism. Thus, non-binary gender appears as a subversive identity that questions the cisheteronormativity established in society. Then, in order to learn about the evolution of LGBTIQ+ manifestations in literature and to better contextualise the research that has been conducted, the most significant authors and texts from the beginnings of literature up to the French narrative of the 21st century have been analysed. In the second decade of the 21st century, it was observed that the use of non-binary identities was starting to take off, where writers such as Alpheratz or Cordélia defended the use of neutral pronouns to give visibility to non-binary people. Within the framework of non-binary narratives, it is noted that the trilogy Les Porteurs shows the struggle of one of her characters to be neutral in a dystopian society where people, at the age of sixteen, have to choose between being a man or a woman. For this reason, the final part of research consists of an exhaustive study of Cat Kueva's three novels based on the aspects of queer theories studied in the theoretical framework. In this way, we can see that the trilogy reflects the critique of cisheteropatriarchal society, the existence of transidentities and the visibility of less normative identities such as non-binary gender. In addition, the study includes the author's own impressions based on a document provided by her and during the interview we had the opportunity to conduct with her. Finally, the results obtained after the study validate the initial hypothesis and it has been confirmed that there are non-binary identities in the French narrative of our times, more specifically in the literary work of Cat Kueva.