Study day "Faire genre: ceci n'est pas un colloque
Organized by
Laurie Schrefheere
Lucas Gutierrez
Léo Sechet
With the collaboration of
Vincent Vivès
Frédérique Amselle
Let's set the scene, let's be like
Masks are removed or dared, in body games
Oripeaux on skins, curtains and fakes
We try methods to make it beautiful
A day like a show whose flow will be fire
A gradual search for echoes
Building and breaking, schemes to wager on
Displaced hills, far from tainted myths
Staging dreams, losing the reins too
Paint the old hell, the rest where our texts oscillate
When our tones smash, smash hostile themes
"Let's defy Reason!"
Let's make the proud reverse a possible land
So no orations, no absolute theses
Knowledge that drifts, seeks, evolves
We won't say: here to reduce
We'll say: let's do without pretending to grasp
Gender, when apprehended as a process of tension and displacement more than as the performative, reiterative game depicted by essentialist approaches, is not given, but made. It is enunciated in reverse, escapes in ellipsis, imprints itself in simulacra. It is feint and revelation, artifice and necessity, the syntax of the body and the poetics of the sign. It's up to us to make this "faire-genre" a reality, this study day being an opportunity to experience it as a gesture in abeyance, a construction in which the structures that compel it and the deviations that liberate it are constantly negotiated. Thus, the concept will be sought in the act - in the factory, in the voice, in the image, in textual and plastic materials. So it's up to us : to pretend to be researchers, not as a subterfuge but as a method, in order to interrogate simulacra and subsequent illusion as strategies of appearance and withdrawal; to consider performative identities, where gender - in the sense of Anglophone gender - fluctuates, is freely made and unmade, outside normative and sclerotic systems; finally, to perform genres - in the sense of Anglophone gender - literary and artistic, by questioning the forms that grasp, stretch and/or unmake them. The aim is not so much to establish an absolute theoretical framework as to open up an indefinite critical space, where the plurivocal concept of "genre", or even "faire-genre" in the first instance, can only be thought through by dint of being undone.
We're still just baby researchers, or at least we're still in the making, in action, in research; but faire genre is all of these things at once: a suspension where we play at being tiny, at being what we're not yet, a space of transition, of indefiniteness, where we look for ourselves in order to find ourselves a little, without ever really settling down. The title makes no bones about it: this is not a colloquium, but an in-between, the epistemological interstice where doing and undoing coexist, rethinking and reconstructing in paradigms, without ever pretending to get there.
In addition, the modalities of intervention will extend this approach: in addition to the subversion in essay of the so-called classic communications, which will also abandon themselves to detours, indirect contributions, in the form of texts, fragments or graphic creations, will be exhibited in the DeScripto room. Thus, these lateral presences, far from being marginal for all that, will constitute a knowledge in circulation, fragmented, polyphonic, and will give rise to an open stage, which, offering everyone the possibility of proposing a setting in voice, will conclude the day in the continuity of its movement.
