Queen Kong theory. Gender goes beyond grammar, let’s free ourselves from the shackles imposed by language, outdated, ossified, fascist! Gender is fluid! This is what the heroine learns from Carnes by Esther Teillard upon arriving in Paris, or rather at the Cergy School of Fine Arts, for which she exchanged the Marseille city of her childhood. The budding visual artist discovers here a world where the confusion of first names and pronouns reigns: “he” becomes “she” and vice versa, or in an indeterminate way by making its transition to “he”. We are far from Marseille, which therefore has nothing feminine about it. Marseille is a guy, the narrator theorizes, the opposite of deconstructed – deconstruction, buildings that collapse or are demolished, Marseille doesn’t really like it. Marseille is like this man in the street who almost crushed him the other day and shouted: “ Big whore, if you weren’t ugly, I’d fuck your pussy. » Marseille is the frank type of collar as well as briefs. Or Marseille, the woman’s version, she’s a cagole, buxom, cheeky, who is not going to let her piece of beach be stolen by a neo-Marseillais who didn’t realize that she had moved there, who neo-Marseillais would risk being knocked out by one of his generous attractions. Verbal, physical, sexual violence… She had had enough of it, the narrator, so she left. It must be said that with a mother who was a prosecutor and left her rape files lying around all over the apartment, since she was very young she knew what a man was capable of doing to a woman, or even to someone who was not yet really a woman. These unbearable images come back to him of this teenager with small breasts who looked like a boy. In the capital, violence is insidious, soft, unmodulated, it attacks like a petty cancer. Paris is masculine but postmodern style, in fashion swipe : the deconstructed man no longer assumes anything, neither a relationship nor even a schedule. It’s fluid, we tell you! If he sleeps with trans people, it’s not so much because he’s in love as because he wants to be “modern”. As for the lumpenproletariat of femininity: the Chinese peripatetics of Belleville and other sex workers are downright invisible.
So the narrator prefers old people and goes out with a forty-year-old writer addicted to porn (since her own mother showed her, as a child, a filmed scene where she was raped): Noé, at least, honors his appointments, better, he fixes them! As her best friend, she has chosen a Slavic bombshell, Hestia, who, through her invincible seduction, turns all these turgid predators around them like a judoka. Hestia’s mother was also raped but the powerful young woman refuses to be a victim, the real or potential executioners, she fucks them! In CarnesEsther Teillard, a new kind of gender theorist, is above all a writer. Mixing the scathing iconoclasty of Virginie Despentes with the electric verve of Guillaume Dustan, the first-time novelist enters the ring of literature as combat poetry in style. And, with this cleverly punk novel, knocks us out.
Esther Teillard
Carnes
Poor
Edition: 3,500 copies.
Price: €20.90; 216 pp.
ISBN: 9782720215797
