Cette thèse examine le rapport conflictuel de femmes au discours social, au travers de leurs relations interpersonnelles féminines, dans *L'intérieur de la nuit* et *Crépuscule du tourment* de Léonora Miano; dans *Le baobab fou* et *Riwan ou le chemin de sable* de Ken Bugul; enfin, dans la biomythographie d'Audre Lorde, *Zami: A New Spelling of my Name*, et une sélection de poèmes. Issues de parcours et de contextes sociogéographiques différents (respectivement le Cameroun, le Sénégal et les États-Unis), les autrices dépeignent des personnages principaux féminins esseulés et inadéquats en regard des normes sociales en vigueur dans leur milieu de vie. Sous-tendues par des représentations du monde autochtones et transculturelles, ces normes témoignent d'une domination patriarcale globalisée, mais influant différemment sur la condition des femmes, selon leur positionnement social. En tant que médium de la communication entre personnages, le discours social est tout d'abord saisi pour ses méfaits. Il transforme les relations féminines en creuset de la socialisation ravageuse, du mépris de l'altérité, de la difficile marginalisation et, paradoxalement, de l'impossible dialogue. Les analyses du discours et de l'énonciation démontrent ensuite que la présence du discours social - avec ses principes de légitimité, de contrôle, de hiérarchie, voire d'exclusion - favorise une rhétorique autre sur l'individualité et l'intersubjectivité. Léonora Miano, Ken Bugul et Audre Lorde font en effet de l'accueil des différences et des différends, ainsi que de l'empathie, des dispositions cognitives profitables à la subjectivité et à la convivialité sociale. / Analyzing female social interaction, this thesis focuses on the conflictual relationship between women and their respective social discourse in the following novels: *L'intérieur de la nuit* and *Crépuscule du tourment* from French-Cameroonian writer Léonora Miano; *Le baobab fou* and *Riwan ou le chemin de sable* from Senegalese writer Ken Bugul; and African-American writer Audre Lorde's biomythography, *Zami: A New Spelling of My Name*, as well as selected poems. The three writers portray characters who are negatively affected by the identity-related norms of their society. Based upon native and transcultural representations of reality, these standards are sustained by, and foster, patriarchy: a global system of domination which affects women in a variety of ways, according to their social positioning. In the scope of this study, social discourse will first be addressed through its consequences: destructive upbringings, a hatred for otherness, social exclusion and, more importantly, the absence of dialogue between women. Nonetheless, while depicting the functions of social discourse (to legitimize, to elevate, to control, and to exclude), Miano, Bugul and Lorde still manage to offer their own visions of communication and individuality. A discursive analysis of their texts will demonstrate that this vision would tend to welcome human differences, discordant perspectives, and empathy as essential principles of love, social cohesion and individual freedom.

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This paper discusses the poetry of Audre Lorde and Natasha Trethewey, and the ways in which they bring to attention the often-silenced histories of African American females. Through close readings of Lorde’s poems “Call” and “Coal,” and Trethewey’s “Three Photographs,” these histories are brought to the present with the framework of the words “call” and “re-call.” The paper explores the ways in which Lorde creates a new mythology for understanding her identity as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” in her innovative, intersectional feminist poetry. This is used as the framework for understanding modern poets like Trethewey, whose identity as a biracial black woman from the American South colors her lyric, more formal work. Lorde uses the vocal, oral tradition of calling as Trethewey relies on visual, gaze-focused recall. Recall is memory and re-call means bringing the hidden past into the future. The paper concludes by saying that all black female writers may participate in their own ways of calling out the truth and remembering what should be forgotten.

Studies of women’s experimental narrative in the twentieth century have often been fixed to political interests in the recovery of women’s artistic practices for inclusion in the canons of literary modernism and formal postmodernism. Concurrent trends in philosophy and critical theory, however, propose the interrogation of the limits of subjectivity itself, suggesting that the most provocative assertions about human experience eschew the very categorical delimitations, like gender, on which such recovery projects depend. This dissertation traces the literary investments of women, particularly queer women, whose experiments in life-writing reconfigure the boundaries of human subjects without relinquishing claims to the material or political conditions that shape their lives. “Rough Text” examines writing that queers or complicates autobiography by featuring self-referential protagonists whose lives illustrate the explosive consequences of both gender and genre manipulation. Writing themselves by unfastening themselves textually, temporally, and spatially, these authors do a liberating violence to their own coherence that shakes, and then rethinks, the grounds of their ontologies in ways that offer alternatives to the “psychological squalor” Fredric Jameson describes as the postmodern condition.

Studies of women’s experimental narrative in the twentieth century have often been fixed to political interests in the recovery of women’s artistic practices for inclusion in the canons of literary modernism and formal postmodernism. Concurrent trends in philosophy and critical theory, however, propose the interrogation of the limits of subjectivity itself, suggesting that the most provocative assertions about human experience eschew the very categorical delimitations, like gender, on which such recovery projects depend. This dissertation traces the literary investments of women, particularly queer women, whose experiments in life-writing reconfigure the boundaries of human subjects without relinquishing claims to the material or political conditions that shape their lives. “Rough Text” examines writing that queers or complicates autobiography by featuring self-referential protagonists whose lives illustrate the explosive consequences of both gender and genre manipulation. Writing themselves by unfastening themselves textually, temporally, and spatially, these authors do a liberating violence to their own coherence that shakes, and then rethinks, the grounds of their ontologies in ways that offer alternatives to the “psychological squalor” Fredric Jameson describes as the postmodern condition.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / For women in patriarchal societies, life is stitched with silence and violence. This is especially true for women of color. In a world that has cast women as invisible and voiceless, to create from the margins is to demand to be seen and heard. Thus, women’s art has never had the privilege of being art for art’s sake and instead is necessarily involved in the work of articulating and (re)writing female experience. When women seek, through their work and art, to feel deeply and connect with other women, they tap into what Audre Lorde has famously termed “the power of the erotic.” Lorde suggests that to acknowledge and trust those deepest feelings within our bodies is a subversive power that spurs social change. In the following work, novels by Kate Chopin, Gayl Jones, and Edwidge Danticat are linked by their female characters who seek the erotic via their art of choice and, in doing so, resist disempowerment and explore the life-giving nature of female connection. Furthermore, because the authors themselves are engaged in rendering the female experience visible, the novels discussed actively converse with their respective waves of feminism and propel social activism and feminist discourse. Hence, this project provides both a close reading of The Awakening, Corregidora, and The Dew Breaker, and a broader contention on the role of women’s literature in social justice.

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Queer people of color in the United States are perpetually under siege politically, psychically, economically, physically, and affectively in the twenty-first century under capitalist white supremacist heteropatriarchy. Radical Self-Care, connects radical artivist performance in Austin, Texas with the theoretical genealogies of queer of color critique, women of color feminism, queer studies, and performance studies in order to propose a program for queer of color survival, sustainment and political revolt. Radical self-care is the holistic praxis that names the confluence of two distinct but inextricable processes developed in the first two chapters of this thesis. In chapter one, I take up the Generic Ensemble Company’s workshop production of What’s Goin’ On? as a case study in order to theorize the ‘performative of sustenance,’ a mechanism of queer worldmaking and queer world sustainment defined by its erotic and utopian affects. Chapter two, through a discussion of reproductive rights activism at the Texas state capitol, reformulates the concept of ‘parrhesia,’ the Socratic practice of ‘free speech’ taken up by Foucault in discussions of the care of the self, into a performance praxis of speaking truth to power with the potential to interrupt hegemonic systems of oppression. The final chapter explicates the ways in which these two mechanisms converge and operate as a dyad in the holistic process of radical self-care through an analysis of Fat: The Play, a devised work that premiered in Austin by and about fat queer femmes. Ultimately, Radical Self- Care aspires to offer queers of color a methodology of queer world sustainment that is also a program of political intervention, grounded in solidarity politics, into those systems of oppression that too often characterize queer of color existence as a project of survival rather than a project of flourishing. / text

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