Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality, 2024
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Undoing the Queer Discourse: Incapability of Language to Recuperate Montaigne’s Monsters
Rama Singh
ABSTRACT:
Mauthner, in his Critique of Language, postulates that language is alive and, therefore, does not remain unchanged from the beginning of the sentence to its end. “In the beginning was the Word”; here, by the sixth word, the meaning of the initial phrasing “in the beginning” has already changed. Mauthner’s insight here doesn’t merely apply to the semantics of language but also serves as an analogy for the nature of discourse, which remains in a state of perpetual flux and evolution. In this essay, I will analyse the evolution of one such discourse, namely the discourse of the queer or the ‘other’, essentially in the critical lexicon, using Montaigne’s work Essais in light of various post-structuralist theories to provide insight into the role of discursive identification and highlight the inevitable undoing of an arguably emancipatory evolution by the very virtue of its utterance and how these texts respond to the paradoxical coexistence of a thesis and its antithesis that is present in every discourse.
keywords: Monstrosity, Queer, Sexuality, Discourse, Binaries