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185 CHAPTER 10 Masculinity in a Minority Setting: The Emblematic Body in Simone Chaput’s Le coulonneux NICOLE CÔTÉ I would like to examine here an issue at the confluence of minority masculinities in Canada: minority studies and globalization. François Paré1 examines the paradoxical identity configuration that is specific to minorities in a globalized world and that transforms the individual’s relationship to identity and origin. He argues that minorities oscillate between an acute and painful consciousness of their marginal status, and oblivion. In our postmodern world, oblivion seems to be one of the strategies by which minority cultures adapt. Indeed, Pare argues that oblivion might not necessarily be a negative strategy, as it allows individuals to move beyond their paralyzing status toward a reinvention of identity, which is then projected into the future. By refusing to dwell on the vulnerability of their first culture, by developing a sense of belonging to the main culture– –even though it might mean endless negotiations– –minorities construct a necessarily hybrid identity. FrancoCanadians follow this trend. Nonetheless, this oblivion strategy takes a toll on identities. Minorities, according to Paré, as a result of oblivion, that survival strategy, suffer both from the atopical– –the loss of a sense of belonging to a specific territory– – linked to “wandering, migration and disorder”;2 and from the amorphous, linked to “the negative, death and the privation of being.”3 For instance, traces of this oblivion strategy– –that is, symptoms of minoritization– –can be found in the texts produced by this culture. In other words, Franco-Canadian literature buries its minoritization characteristics deeper into its textual fabric. Minorities thus, in their cultural texts, display both an “ontological lack”– –a constant feeling of being invisible or in the process of vanishing– – and “practices of dislocation at work in all minority cultures.”4 186 THE MINORITY MALE Subjectivity being traditionally founded on the relation to an excluded or subordinate other who suffers the above symptoms, I would like to investigate how symptoms of minoritization affect the display of masculinity of Le coulonneux’s main protagonist and narrator.5 I am thinking here first and foremost of Gabriel Tardiff’s minoritization as a Franco-Canadian and North American, but my analysis will also consider the fact that he is a white hetero male, his identity thus showing a mixture of minority and majority traits. I will compare his status to that of his female equivalent in years and ethnic belonging, Amandine. If we consider, as Butler contends, that “sexual and racial differences are not discrete axes of power”6 and that gender is a way of “doing,” of styling the body, a “sculpting of the original body into a cultural form,”7 what does this Franco-Canadian novel tell us about the minoritization of the hegemonic gender? What does it tell us about Gabriel’s relation to his body– –his self-styling– –and to other sexed bodies? In accordance with Paré’s findings about oblivion as an alternative strategy of survival for minorities, Le coulonneux often buries the minority status of its characters and their environment. This burying is manifested in the obliterating strategies of the male and female characters, of which the strangest might be a desire for invisibility. The protagonist Gabriel, of FrancoManitoban heritage, suffers symptoms of minoritization typical of FrancoCanadians . Yet being male and white, he holds a certain majority status. How does this particular configuration of power shape his hetero masculinity in relation to the female protagonists? STRATEGIES OF OBLIVION:THE ATOPICAL ANDTHE AMORPHOUS The protagonist of Le Coulonneux is emblematic of the exiguity symptom that Paré discussed in his Littératures de l’exiguïté, for in him are condensed the “atopical, that which has no place assigned,”8 according to Paré’s typology , and the amorphous, linked to negation and to ontological lack.9 According to Paré, the “atopical” is at the same time a condition of cultural exiguity and a symptom of the oblivion present in the works produced in minority conditions . In Le coulonneux, among the two types of distanciation from the self that I mentioned earlier, the most obvious, the “atopical,” translates into the relentless pursuit of some elusive desire by taking the road, which brings about a constant disorientation– –a sort of permanence amidst the transitory– – an itinerancy. In La distance habitée, Paré defines itinerancy thus: “a group of practices of dislocation, the dislocation at work in all the minority cultures: shifting, diglossia, assimilation, displacement, compromise and delegation...

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