Ce texte est celui de ma courte présentation au colloque DHUnbound 2022.
For this end of the conference, allow me a lighter presentation.
I would like to present a research, still in its beginning time. I therefore apologize in advance for any approximation or vagueness and I am very eager to talk about it with you all.
I will therefore evoke here the importance of queer literature, in a very broad sense, within the corpus of electronic literature. Of course all the artworks discuss here are part of the Répertoire des écritures numériques, but we’ll talk about it on Saturday, so let’s skip on that.
The tools of creation and diffusion of the artworks have been popularized and are easily accessible, even for people who do not know how to code. There is a great diversity of literary forms, as we could see through this conference, from the literature of social networks, to interactive fictions or hypertexts, and even if I may narrative video games and visual novel. The constituted corpus is very heterogeneous and raises the question of the possibility of a global study, even thematic, of the works.
This accessibility could allow a better representation of many groups! If we like particularly the fan fictions and the ship of detour within popular fictions, many other forms were able, since the opening of the platforms, to give a chance to queer kids and more particularly trans kids to reach representations.
More broadly, the opportunity to glimpse the diversity of identities has allowed many young readers, including yours truly here, to imagine a life outside the heteronormative framework.
with a few examples, I hope to offer a tiny glimpse of the forms of queer literature and their richness in my body of work. As some of you here know, I have a deep love for digital storytelling tools, so I’m going to organize my corpus around them. Of course I’ll refer to my research on reading gesture – briefly – and immersion through Ryan, Murray, Calleja and Langlet mainly.
Thus, a platform like Wattpad, which allows to publish long texts organized in the form of chapters following each others, has allowed us to approach novel forms. The work of Mx Cordélia, for the French corpus, is particularly striking. If xe was first identified as a popularizing youtuber on gender identities with xyr project PrincePrincesse, xyr texts have federated a strong community of trans kids. In numerous interviews, xe has admitted that xe wants to open up the representations in the child and young adult literature. Xyr novel My Friend Gabrielle presents non-binary, trans and queer characters in a broad sense. And a possibility for them all to live and be loved in a happy steady life.
This first form could seems a bit traditional but, let’s start from here.
Interactive fictions have become much more accessible in their creation since the popularization of Twine in the beginning of the 2010’s and its graphic interface.
While fiction has a prominent place, essays are also represented. Videogame studies thus offer us multiple-choice auto-ethnographies directly created with the tool. this community is often described as queer and female oriented, so it’s not a surprise to find it here!
So in Nonbinary: a choose your own adventure of Adan Jerreat-Poole it is possible to embody a non-binary doctoral student in his or her complex journey within the institution and to cross many references! – and I thank from the bottom of my heart the Pika-Pi research and reading group of the University of Montreal for this wonderful discovery.
The reader can then choose their way through the usual reality but in the shoes of this particular queer scholar. This immersion and identification is obvious and allow me to pass a bit fast on it, the hypertext studies will sustain us all with the accurate demo if needed.
Less – a bit less — accessible forms have, in turn, been able to open up diverse representations to the community: the webtoon Castle Swimmer presents a romance between mermen. Were it is all but a focus : they have a war to win and shark-men and clownfishmen are busy people ! the striking fantasy universe is clearly a level of immersion in Langlet and Besson’s sense !
Homophil, for its part, revisits the history of gay struggles in Germany, taking up the aesthetics of the militant zines of the 90s. reviving tis particular part of history and allowing us to learn from it
To come back to my previous communication in this conference, visual novels using Ren’Py, a development tool based on Python, but with a large community, notably queer and fanfiction authors, have allowed the development of queer visual novels as can be. Thus There’s this girl or Butterfly soup of Brianna Lei are lesbian romances, when Missed message is a thriller that goes wrong … on a background of queer flirtation. The EXACT same immersion could be use here : the agentivity and manipulations and diverse multimedia content help each reader to feel the fictionnal world created.
Finally, another kind of author, or at least an auctorial figure, exists thanks to digital technology: the bots!
I can’t resist including in this very brief overview generative writing such as: Sapphic reads bot. these citations show and curate a lot of texts to help them exist in the informational sphere, and particularly in our own small cyberspace.
The ease of access obviously allows new voices to be heard.
The creation of diverse representations and independent publishing spaces has been able to open up the possibility of publication in traditional networks to queer works. Characters and authors have been able to move – for some, according to their wishes – to more traditional publications, allowing for even more representation… and for more fan fiction.
So stay tune! and I can’t wait, in all honesty, to dive in and see what happens next.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Emmanuelle Lescouët (24 mai 2022). [CSDH] Queer Writing 3.0. Imaginarium. Consulté le 13 février 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/q3px