Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Amy L. Hubbell / According to Feminist Theory, the social construction of gender is carried out through
ritualistic or performative acts in everyday life. The idea of “doing” gender, or the
“understanding of gender as a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction” has
been commonplace in this field for over three decades (West and Zimmerman 125).
Contemporary French author Anna Gavalda toys with typical gender stereotypes in her novel
Ensemble c'est tout creating characters who “do” gender and culture utilizing a mix of
stereotypical and subversive gender traits.
In this thesis I will discuss and analyze how Gavalda's main characters simultaneously
accept and reject many gender stereotypes, displaying a variety of masculine and feminine traits
in their daily lives, performing their genders in an unconventional fashion, and promoting an
ideal of androgynous behavior. In the end, Gavalda manages to create a sort of “spatial justice”
in which the characters fulfill more than just the traditional roles society expects from them.
The majority of Gavalda's work integrates French culture, specifically the French meal,
in order to set the tone. True to form, she highlights the importance of commensality in French
society with considerable amounts of the story's intrigue taking place around meals. The meals
themselves become performative acts, ritualized and carried out in much the same way as
gender. Gavalda promotes the institution of the French “repas” and the conviviality that
accompanies it.
Her representations of food and gender beg a variety of questions relating to the role of
the modern French woman's appetite and femininity, hierarchies in (and out) of the kitchen, as
well as the notion of class in relation to eating well. By combining typical gender expectations
with more subtle subversion of societal roles, is Gavalda in fact cooking up a recipe for an
androgynous kitchen? The integration of these gender behaviors built around the institution of
the French “repas” underscores a shift in the current societal standards promoting a new
collective ideal for social change.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:KSU/oai:krex.k-state.edu:2097/2349 |
| Date | January 1900 |
| Creators | Heraud, Abby R. |
| Publisher | Kansas State University |
| Source Sets | K-State Research Exchange |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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