The Postsexual Transition : Sex and Love after Sexuality in Contemporary French Novel.

Abstract

My dissertation reads the contemporary French novel from the viewpoint of the history of sexuality, and argues that sexuality (as a Foucauldian apparatus that shaped erotic subjectivities in the modern era) is declining today. Chapter 1 shows that, in the postmodern era, gay marriage implies the decline of sexuality: as the hetero/homo binary becomes obsolete for the purposes of defining who can marry whom, sexuality forfeits the prominent role it had had in the construction of personal identities. I call the decline of sexuality that characterizes the postmodern era “the postsexual transition.” The two following chapters focus on Michel Houellebecq and Virginie Despentes, authors who depict the experience of romantic love through the perspective of their specific gender, sexual, social, and political identities. Chapter 2 analyzes Les Particules Elémentaires (1998), the science-fiction novel of straight male novelist Michel Houellebecq, which describes how humanity metamorphoses into a neo-humanity that reproduces itself through cloning instead of heterosexual intercourse. In this context, heterosexuality becomes useless and even zombie-like, devoid of any substance. Chapter 3 deals with Virginie Despentes’s controversial problematization of rape and prostitution in her best-sellers Baise-Moi (1994) and King Kong Théorie (2006). I argue that the book’s lesbian and pro-sex feminism, which provoked an outcry from feminist quarters, becomes perfectly legible once we view it as an instance of a postsexual transition. For Manu, one of the two heroines of the novel and a rape survivor, sex is not about desire or identities; it is a source of potential intensification of pleasure or pain, and nothing more. While Despentes’s critics continue to define sexuality as the basis of the modern individual’s authentic subjectivity, she insisted on representing sexuality as a superficial type of human contact with no depth to it. Both novels show that the decline of sexuality impairs the experience of romantic love, which is premised on the notion that male and female are essentially complementary. But significantly, while Houellebecq, a middle-class, heterosexual, white male writer, seems unable to accept the decline of sexuality, Despentes, a queer author, embraces the new erotic possibilities opened up by the postsexual transition.