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Abstract

A State of Openness: Gurlesque Existentialism in Mare Kandre’s Bübins unge and Aliide, Aliide This article examines the combination of gurlesque aesthetics and existentialist themes of anxiety in Mare Kandre’s Bübins unge (1987) and Aliide, Aliide (1991). My ambition is to enable a deeper understanding of what I call “the Dark Girlhood”, that is, the existential pain that Kandre’s female characters constantly seem to experience. While previous readings take the social conditions of the characters as their starting point in analyzing the existential darkness of the novels, I show how their dark girlhood can be read as a fundamental human suffering outside the categories of male and female, even if the depicted existential anxiety stems from female experiences. Based on the term gurlesque and Martin Heidegger's view on anxiety, the article shows that Kandre’s dark girlhood can be regarded an expression of gurlesque existentialism – a term that, in addition to encircling an aesthetical and philosophical dimension of the motif, shows that the seemingly unrelated orientations of existentialism and gurlesque can blend together and create something new.

Keywords

• Angst
• Bachtin
• Body
• Butler
• Existentialism
• Girlhood