Ambigua (Dec 2015)
Hypersexualisation discursive et vaginalisation du discours chez Isabel Franc
Abstract
Does gender affects writing? Asking this irritates many authors, readers and critics: they are convinced that writing has nothing to do with sex and gender. Still, this question inhabits the core of Isabel Franc (akaLola Van Guardia)'s work, since her first novel, Entre todas las mujeres(1992), to her last one, Elogio del happy end(2012). To Franc, the text, its forms and contents must be, transcribe and brandish femininity in a statement of radical identity and political activism —that is lesbianism, as it happens, in many sorts of more or less experimental versions according to the use of narrative and discursive plans (above all, by using a very special kind of intertextuality). It aims to change the point of view and put reality upside down by making both characters and grammar feminine,and even lesbian, to force new ways of looking at established order. First, this paper defines the theoretical and ideological basis Franc erects her work on, then the outlines of her work (where she builds her authorself). It studies the different phases of this process, following its constructing and deconstructing by picking up and taking back intellectual, spiritual and cultural ideals of Spain in the second part of the twentieth century. A systematic analysis of Franc's novels allows to fully understand their transgressive impact as well as their limits: their revolutionary extent is ultimately rather small, because past the "sole" lesbian thematic, they don't cover nor question other factors of the creation/sedimentation of one's identity and simplify things so much that they can't be fully free of the classic system of domination.
