Colloque

Roxane et la domestication du désir homosocial féminin

Danielle Bobker

Membre a labase

Danielle Bobker

Résumé de la communication

My paper explores the depiction of female sexuality in a series of English texts featuring an oriental empress called Roxana or Roxolana. Roxane, as Katie Trumpener has dubbed this composite figure, draws together aspects of the Persian first wife of Alexander the Great (Roxana), and a Ukranian-born slave (Roxolana) who, in the sixteenth century, became the first woman to marry an Ottoman sultan. Feminist literary scholars have shown that what links the various English Roxanes to one another is their common association with a heightened, politicized mode of femininity (Trumpener), maternal jealousy (Nussbaum), or heterosexual seduction as performance (Ballaster). I draw attention instead to Roxane’s ongoing value as a signifier of the intense forms of identification, competition, and desire that bind ambitious women to one another through triangulated relationships with powerful men. Fusing sexuality studies with genre studies, the literary history I trace correlates shifting attitudes towards female homosocial desire with the processes of formal adaptation that underwrite Roxane’s resilience in English writing. The key word here is domestication, both in the general sense of making local, familiar, and private, and in the specific, technical sense of narrative concretization and concentration, processes which, as Michael McKeon has recently argued, were crucial to the emergence of domestic novels.

Résumé du colloque

Le 11 mai en soirée, le documentaire "Les Fros" (ONF, 2010) sera présenté. La réalisatrice, Stéphanie Lanthier, sera présente et fera une brève allocution pour présenter son film et répondra aux questions du public après le visionnement. Le 12 mai en soirée aura lieu le vernissage de l’exposition « Projet Stanstead ou comment traverser la frontière » à la galerie d’art Foreman de Bishop’s. L'événement est une collaboration entre la galerie et notre colloque. Le grand public, les chercheurs présents au colloque et les artistes pourront échanger lors de ce cocktail-vernissage.