Troubles dans les frontières: divisions genrées et divisions territoriales chez Jacques Abeille

• Autores: Ivanne Rialland
• Localización: Studi francesi, ISSN 0039-2944, Nº. 187, 2019, págs. 87-99
• Idioma: francés
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• Resumen

  • Conceived at first as a “kind of philosophical tale”, Jacques Abeille’s Les Jardins statuaires (1982) is the beginning of a novel cycle, Le Cycle des contrées, which offers an adventurous and ethnographic journey through an imaginary territory. The ethnographic description conveys a criticism of our Western civilization, based on rationality and technics. Le Cycle des contrées, with its narrators “between two worlds”, presents repeated trespassing and merging of the fictive territorial frontiers, and that way enlightens and celebrates the margins of those societies. From that point of view, these books may appear to be promoting queer zones. But this enhancement of margins supposes, indeed, the persistence of frontiers. There is a paradoxical staging of territorial and cultural bonds, that gender relations reveal. Gender relations in theses fictive societies are analysed and criticized, but, in the end, sex difference and heterosexuality are given as biological data. This supposed natural complementarity between sexes is, according to Jacques Abeille’s novels, the ultimate basis of alterity, as opposed to the deadly uniformity of Terrèbre civilization. Furthermore, women’s alienation itself is positively described, as the way of producing and preserving their singularity. As the domination is always negatively perceived, the margins have to be maintained in their inferior position in order to preserve their positivity.