Of Women and Other Myths: Performing Femininity in Contemporary Indian Feminist Literature
Résumé
Using the notion of ‘performativity’ developed by John L. Austin, the “Performance Studies” problematize the visual and textual analysis of gender representations by relocating in the bodies in action the agency of both individuals and social groups. The four-voice panel that we are proposing follows the lines of the program and the seminar “Gender Cultural Performances”, that we have been conducting in Paris for the last two years. Our intention is both to present some of the major debates of this seminar, which were led by various scholars with various perspectives, and to propose some new discussions of this topic.
In this seminar, our purpose was to focus and ponder on the way feminist movements and queer theories enabled to question the modern conceptions of artistic creation (Bourcier). Consequently, their fertile articulation offered us the remarkable epistemological frame of an intersectional approach of the politics of “transvestism”, a notion that was used as a “fil rouge”, a common thread in our seminar this year. Furthermore, the notion of “transvestism” is interesting to us as it significantly displays the social transformation produced by minorities (Butler, de Lauretis). These debates and thoughts led us to develop an interdisciplinary approach of creation, performance, and entertainment, from our respective disciplines and research fields (dance, videogames, cinema, literature).
With a corpus of North Indian modern fictions, Anne Castaing will show the way literature, as both a creative process and a speech act, and thus as a show, allows to deconstruct gender identities. Whereas such approach remains alternative and rarely requested, Anne Castaing will show how hybrid characters, which are common in South Asian modern literatures, allow to rethink the literary field as a space of performance, where to transform and to claim for subversive gender identities.