The Anti-Orpheus: Queering Myth in Ducastel et Martineau’s Théo et Hugo dans le même bateau (Paris 05:59)

Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s 2016 film Théo et Hugo dans le même bateau (Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo) concludes on an Orphic note, inviting a consideration of the entire film as based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The film appropriates but also radically transforms elements of the foundational myth—including especially Orpheus’s turn to pederasty in Ovid’s Latin version—crafting a queer love story based on potentiality out of the tragedy of the heterosexual love story. In so doing, the film channels Herbert Marcuse’s idea of Orphic refusal in Eros and Civilization, opening up the myth to reconfigure Orphic constructs of gender and sexuality for utopian ends

Multimedia Archival Work in Paris: The Reception of LGBTQ French Cinema

I will be conducting archival work and interviews in Paris in the next year (depending on when travel becomes possible) to complete the research for a monograph on LGBTQ French Film of the twenty-first century. This trip will allow me to conduct new research necessary to add missing sections in the monograph in process

Lupine and zig-zag lines: queer affects in Alain Guiraudie’s L’inconnu du lac and Rester vertical

In this article I investigate how a theory of becomings-animal operates in a number of contemporary queer French films by director Alain Guiraudie (L’inconnu du lac (2013) and Rester vertical (2016)). In particular I explore how a becomings-animal’s association with a Deleuzian theory of affect enhances our understanding of queer intimacy. The aim of this article is to reposition queer intimacy as an ontology outside – outside synthetic and vertical lines of filiation and kinship and inside the disjunctive lines of the outside (what is irregular, random, rural, cosmic). Drawing at first on intimacy as an ontological non-relationality (Bersani 2008; 2009) and on the idea of separation as an ontological necessity of queer intimacy (John Paul Ricco 2017), I want to rethink queer intimacy as exposure outwards – an intimacy to and towards. Within this exteriorization of intimacy, my methodology will rely on the affective power of a Deleuzian theory of lines

Framing masculinity: The discourse of moderation in Renaissance culture.

Most discussions of gender are based on the idea of a binary opposition, but this dissertation examines a ternary structure that links moderation and masculinity. Aristotle's corpus provides the philosophical underpinnings for an understanding of moderate masculinity, which is opposed to immoderate and deficient femininity. The highly relational and unstable moderate position relies on gender-coded extremes for its definition. This dissertation aims to show the vestiges and transformations of the ternary gender structure in various aspects of Renaissance culture through readings of a number of French and Latin texts. In chapter I, I argue that the instability of a new middle class, which corresponds to moderate masculinity, requires an analogical use of this gender structure in pedagogical discourse, in which the lower and upper classes are identified with non-moderate femininity. In chapter II, I examine how marriage attempts to moderate the sexual aspects of masculinity in part through the construction of a non-moderate wife. And yet, since marriage also contributes to the instability of moderate masculinity, it cannot ultimately moderate the man; Panurge's unsuccessful quest for a wife in Rabelais's Tiers Livre (1546) reflects the failure of this process. In chapter III, I argue that when a man does not act courageously, he fails to motivate the signifier man and causes a disruption in etymological motivation. In Rabelais's Quart Livre (1551), the combination of excessive and deficient motivation/masculinity frames a moderate view of signs. Finally, in chapter IV, I claim that the representation of sodomy as immoderate in Montaigne's De l'amitie (1580) and in Renaissance culture in general is required because woman cannot be allowed to hold the position of stable, immoderate other. Moreover, as Montaigne reveals, masculine desire risks becoming immoderate in male-male friendship, and an other relationship must serve as a contrasting case. I conclude by discussing ways in which repositioning or reconceiving the elements of the ternary resists this gender structure.Ph.D.Language, Literature and LinguisticsRomance literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130805/2/9811166.pd

Preparing graduate students to teach: The role of literature faculty

This chapter discusses how faculty who work and teach in literary/ cultural studies can contribute to training graduate students in teaching at the upper levels. Beginning with some ideas about how the various, usually separate, aspects of graduate education “in literature” can begin to be placed in a more productive dialogue, the chapter then focuses on ways in which graduate literature seminars can directly dialogue with teaching. After considering key textual or contextual questions around a given author, theme, or period over the course of a semester, faculty could invite graduate students to think about how those “research” questions can be adapted to the undergraduate classroom. As a representative case study, the author draws upon his own experiences teaching graduate seminars in Renaissance French literature