Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Comparative Literature

Advisor

Nancy K. Miller

Advisor

Bettina Lerner

Committee Members

Giancarlo Lombardi

Subject Categories

Comparative Literature | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | French and Francophone Language and Literature | Women's Studies

Abstract

This dissertation investigates a trope and positionality I call antisocial femininity as a way to see how it may be a useful positionality and not antisocial at all. The point of departure for my project is located in 19th century French decadence and responds to two complementary aspects of decadent subjectivity against which antisocial femininity is defined: the need to withdrawal from the natural world and a retreat into intellectual abstraction. These definitions demand an explicit withdrawal from society and extol a self-imposed isolation that allows the subject to recreate oneself uniquely outside of the structures of modernity. This narrative of embodiment, at the time, caused violent misogynistic repulsion towards women who wished to enact this social refusal. One of the most important aspects of this dissertation is that it re-envisions, in our contemporary moment, a parallel position to this this self-imposed isolation and subject position for a ‘feminine’ subject.

A current theoretical touchstone that resonates with this can be found in Mari Ruti’s work on “opting out.” Ruti asserts that the “defiant subjects” of a queer theory of negativity utilize a paradigm similar to the decadent subject: the gay male anti-hero (i.e. Jean Genet) while the rest of us are relegated to the relational, which Ruti calls “the universe of intersubjective others.” Throughout my dissertation, I ask who the other antisocial figures could be? Frequently dismissed, even in queer discourses, the feminine is conflated with the relational as part of this universe of others. Using texts that purposefully pull apart the ‘feminine’ and the ‘social,’ this work asks for a reevaluation of the concepts that stick to our idea of social interaction, care, community, and relationality.

How this relationality is communicated becomes the second focus of my project. I answer this question by rethinking relationality in literature in a way that includes the understanding of the reader and restructures their vision of what the social means. To include the reader, I locate this textual site of experience in what Leigh Gilmore calls “autobiographics.” Gilmore reframes self-representational writing as writing that tells a story that cannot fit into any dominant discourses but uses the requirements of the genre of autobiography and the truth value implied by the genre to decentralize a coalesced self. For Gilmore, culturally constructed ideological discourses, a reader’s narrative or reading, and a writer’s ‘teasing out’ of self on the page exist together and function dynamically. This triangulation hails the reader to situate themselves and this creates the potential to undo ideological constraints.

I contribute to an already important discourse in queer and feminist theory about instrumentalized refusal, defiance, or frigidity. Sara Ahmed calls for a kind of queer “reorientation”; Legacy Russell envisions “Glitch Feminism”; Bonnie Honig calls it “The Feminist Theory of Refusal.” For Kevin Quashie this is “The Sovereignty of Quiet.” Xine Yao intervenes with “marginalized unfeeling.” This dissertation focuses on deconstructing feminine instances of discord to question what it means to be social. I have chosen three affective modes through which antisocial femininity moves to reorient the self: Disgust, Anger, and Apathy. Each of these modes are affects that conventionally, when performed by a femme-identified individual, are considered to be antisocial and each affective experience troubles a conflation with the feminine as inherently belonging to/being possessed by a dominant idea of the social. My theoretical introduction outlines the foundational ideas of decadent subjectivity and Rachilde’s overturning of these notions, theories of the autobiographical, and concepts of reading and writing intersubjectively that inform each chapter.

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