Carine Barbafieri, winner of an IUF fundamental chair
Madame Carine Barbafieri, University Professor of 17th-century French literature, has been awarded a senior chair by the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF).
After a cycle of research on French tragedy and gallantry, another on the critical category of "bad taste", Carine Barbafieri is currently working on inconvenient laughter, aggressive laughter or laughter that hurts modesty, as well as on the reception of 17th-century French theater abroad.
"Female geloscopy. Laughter at the time of the emergence of discourses on modesty (late sixteenth-eighteenth century)".
The project aims to examine the sexual fascination that women's laughter begins to arouse from the emergence of discourses on modesty, both from a linguistic and literary, societal and medical point of view. It is in fact in the modern period (late 16th-18th centuries) that women's laughter takes on a frankly sexual connotation, while never ceasing to be praised in the context of social relations, as long as it is moderate. The project has three axes: (1) identify pattern of veiled sexual jokesand study how women respond; (2) draw up a typology of bad laughter and study places of resistance to the normalization of laughter; (3) draw up a cross-history of the mouth and the female sex, starting with the discovery of the clitoris in the mid-sixteenth century, the papillary structure of the tongue and Sténon's canal in the mid-seventeenth century.
