Quand proférer, c’est faire : resignifications des filles « ingouvernables » chez Josée Yvon, Chloé Savoie-Bernard et Catherine Lalonde
Based on the performative force of insults that shapes the writing of three Quebec poets, this dissertation explores the discursive strategies through which they reverse the stigmatization of women embedded in injurious speech. Such vocabulary as “fées mal tournées”, “plotes de riche”, “crisse de folles”, “bâtardes”, “sorcières” and “chiennes” is plentiful in Filles-commandos bandées (1976) by Josée Yvon, Royaume scotch tape (2015) by Chloé Savoie-Bernard and La dévoration des fées (2017) by Catherine Lalonde. The poets all create voices that reclaim insults in order to “re-signify” them, as Judith Butler conceives in Excitable Speech (1997). Being both the insulted and the insulting, they seize the power that animates insults to deflect them, endowing them with unexpected meanings and transforming them into neutral and even positive terms of identification. Taking up the insults received, the writers intertwine them with the powerful characters of the Amazon, the witch and the fairy, and shape figures who reject the corsets that enclose not only their body, but also their speech. These “girls”, at times violent, vulnerable, suffering or frightening, all shine with sovereign irreverence. In that, they appear to be incarnations of Kathleen Rowe’s Unruly Woman (1995), a symbol of insubordination. Carried away by the affects that inhabit them, their excessive, desiring, desacralized and sometimes grotesque, even abject bodies, are filled with impulses and violent fantasies. This research thus examines the ways in which the “girls” of Yvon, Savoie-Bernard and Lalonde appropriate the power of anger and, positioning themselves between vulnerability and ungovernability, reveal themselves as both threatening and unifying.
insult linguistic performativity unruly woman feminism gender studies contemporary Quebec poetry women’s writing