As the author of Pourquoi je ne suis pas féministe (1928), Rachilde rejected progressive social movements. For example: can sex exceed the human body? Can a transgender person live a heteronormative life? What is the relationship between queerness and reproduction? In asking such questions, this article grounds a piece of Decadent, fin-de-siècle French literature in the context of queer, feminist and trans studies, and thereby maps the connections between Rachilde’s work and these contemporary cultural conversations. Monsieur Vénus and queer theory are mutually illuminative: Butler’s theory of performativity allows us to interpret the unstable bodies in Rachilde’s text, while Monsieur Vénus in turn elucidates, or at least exemplifies, some of the questions at the heart of queer studies. Taking Monsieur Vénus (1884) as its focus, this article expands upon the limited critical discourse connecting the work of Rachilde (1860-1953) to queer theory.
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