About

The present-day globalization of Victorian writing can be traced back to the extraordinary plasticity of its textual and visual forms, as it travelled from place to place and media to media. Such temporal, geographical, cultural and intermedial persistence is the subject of this seminar which considers the different modes of resistance of Victorian aesthetics, ideology and technology within the nineteenth-century as well as survival and rebirth in later times and digital form. The idea of the seminar is to allow speakers to discuss their area of research with others through a study of texts and chosen images, and thus open out their subject to other corpora, centuries, disciplines. A respondent is chosen for each session to allow a dialectical approach which might enrich and develop the project of the speaker. Texts and images are chosen for each session and made available on our blog beforehand.

This seminar takes place at the Université Paris Cité and is supervised by Professor Sara Thornton. It is part of the “Frontières du Littéraire” pathway within the LARCA research group (UMR 8225 du CNRS).

For further information, contact Róisín Quinn-Lautrefin (roisinql@hotmail.fr), Estelle Murail (estelle_murail@yahoo.fr), Clémence Folléa (clemence.follea@gmail.com), or Sandeep Bakshi, (Sandeep.Bakshi@u-paris.fr).

The seminar usually takes place once a month at 5pm at the following address:

Bâtiment “Olympe-de-Gouges”, salle 347, 8 place Paul-Ricoeur, 75013, métro/RER Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand.

All are welcome!

Next session: Empires, Souths, Sexualites / Victorian Persistence, LARCA

24 April 2024, ODG 163, Place Paul Ricoeur, 75013 Paris, 6.00-8.00 pm

Hybrid format: email e.murail@icp.fr to get the Zoom link.

Trung Nguyên Quang, Cresppa-CSU (Université Paris VIII / INED)

Trung Nguyên Quang, “The Respectable Victim of Homophobia: Sexual minorities at the intersection of class, gender and race before the law“

Based on ethnography and archival work conducted at the Defender of Rights, the paper examines the processes by which victims of homophobia refer to the institution, claiming discrimination based on sexual orientation. The paper analyses the discursive strategies whereby complainants present themselves to the Defender of Rights, and shows how those strategies are dependent on, and vary according to, class, race and gender. These strategies do not equally meet with success, some discursive practices resulting in a favorable examination by the institution where others do not. I therefore contend that the favorability rate of a complaint’s examination depends on how class, gender and race are articulated, both in between themselves and with sexuality, and are negotiated by the complainants. The paper shows how a respectabilizing script of self-presentation is constructed through those discursive practices, thus producing a respectable victim of homophobia at the intersection of class, gender and race. I consequently argue that the recognition of homophobia by the State rests more on the identity of the victim than the nature of the infraction.

Trung Nguyên Quang is a PhD student in sociology at Université Paris VIII and the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED). He  lectures at the Department of Law and Political Science of the Université Paris Nanterre as well. His research focuses on the perception, categorisation and handling of anti-LGBT+ violence both at the individual level of day-to-day interactions, and at the level of State policies in contemporary France. It examines the ways in which the acceptance of sexual and gender minorities, amongst the cultural elite, has become a norm constructed at the intersection of class, race and gender, and shows how this norm of acceptance, rather than weakening heteronormativity, contributes to sustaining it. More information is available on his research unit’s website,  https://www.cresppa.cnrs.fr/csu/equipe/les-membres-du-csu/nguyen-quang-trung/?lang=fr