LE3 .A278 2022

2022

Quéma, Anne

Acadia University

Master of Arts

Masters

English

English & Theatre Studies

In my Master’s thesis I provide a genealogy of the manifesto beginning at the outset of the twentieth century as a way to foreground my examination of lesbian and queer polemics. The genre of the manifesto is polemical through the way the writers declare their political views, which they do by both contending against another individual or party and by proclaiming their stance for revolution and change. For my discussion, I argue that Nicole Brossard’s French Kiss (1974) and Sina Queyras’s My Ariel (2017) appropriate the affect of the manifesto in order to disrupt traditional and heteronormative narrative forms that resist a historically situated dominant culture. Each text deploys political resistance by using narrative and visual fragmentation to create a counterdiscourse of gender and sexual disruption. Thus, by appropriating the affect from the genre of the manifesto, Brossard and Queyras disrupt the very stability of oppressive forms of narratives built upon heteronormative phallocentric traditions.

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:3886