Chitrangada Deb
2020-03-17
<p>Autonomous selves incarcerated under hegemonic binaries invent new forms of language. Performance of<br>
desire transforms all body parts into independent and unrestricted meaning-making machines.<br>
Consequently, state-sponsored, syntactic language dismantles, and a silent, schizophrenic rhythm is<br>
created. Genet’s objective in Un Chant d’Amour is to claim this primal silence of sexual bodies and their<br>
identities through symbolic metamorphosis of objects, dance, fantasies and longings. Originally<br>
conceptualized as an image film with no script and dialogue, Genet’s tour de force exhibits sexuality and<br>
performing bodies as brute force rupturing the veil of the big Other. The film unfolds inside a Foucauldian<br>
Panopticon-like prison cell, where the Guard observes, interrogates, tortures, and simultaneously derives<br>
voyeuristic pleasure out of the inmates’ sexual acts carried out under ‘enclosure’. The Guard is not only<br>
the measuring rod which bears the mark of state capitalism, but is also a divided subject, split between his<br>
duties toward the order and his native libidinal responses. Genet’s film is attuned to the subversive<br>
Postmodernist ambience of the 1950s’ Europe when the ‘centre’ was dismantled leading to a proliferation<br>
of multiple centres, multiple truths and thus multiple sexualities. In my proposed paper, I would look at<br>
theatre artist Jean Genet’s only (silent ) film Un Chant d’Amour (“A Song of Love”), released in 1950 and<br>
subsequently banned, and investigate how in its presentation of homosexuality, Genet adheres to as well<br>
deviates from Foucault’s ‘sexuality’, considered as the most powerful starting point of Queer Theory. This<br>
paper would further delve into the various aporias generated in the text, and the absence of language as a<br>
tool for restructuring and re-writing.</p>
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3714909
oai:zenodo.org:3714909
Zenodo
https://zenodo.org/communities/postscriptum
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3712885
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
postScriptum: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literary Studies ISSN: 2456-7507, 5(1), (2020-03-17)
Performing Bodies and Bodies in Performance in Genet's Un Chant d'Amour
info:eu-repo/semantics/article