FRENCH 80BB - Beyond the Binary: Sex, Gender, and Nature in Premodern French Writing

How do early modern French texts produce, reinforce, or destabilise binaries? This course explores how, in the period around the ‘fixing’ of the French language by the Académie française into the regulated forms we are familiar with today, grammatical and material-social genders alike could be weird and unstable. How and why were binaries read in nature, and where did these threaten to break down? How did sexual difference and gender nonconformity register in scientific and social discourses? By tracing the histories of a series of major structuring binaries (including nature/culture, male/female, normal/monstrous), we will examine the unruly realities that these pairs would seek to organize, and the ways in which early modern textual forms themselves challenge binaries such as ‘literary’/’non-literary’.