QUEER(ING) QUÉBEC: A Review through Literature, Film, and Performance

Questions of same-sex desire, and gender non-conformity and fluidity have played a significant role in the arts in Quebec throughout the modern period, but they have achieved their specific expressions in dialogue with the predominant social, political, and cultural issues that waxed and waned over this time. This lecture will explore some of these intersections, beginning with a look at texts that attempted to speak from a queer place at a time when the Roman Catholic church exercised its dominance. In the mid-20th century, this produced some surprising results : the first transexual novel involving a Bishop (!), a tale of schoolboy decadence, a nocturnal odyssey through Montreal…In the period of the Quiet Revolution that followed, questions of sexuality often served as allegories for the « coming out » of the Quebec nation, for breaking what were seen as the colonial dynamics of Quebec’s place within Canada. In plays such as Michel Tremblay’s Hosanna, affirming sexual and national identities became richly intertwined. Feminist and lesbian writers, on the other hand, often embarked upon daring formal experiments, seeking an écriture au féminin that sought to undermine patriarchal epistemologies that governed nationalist politics. More recently, a new anti-colonial dynamic has brought to the fore two-spirited Indigenous writing, theatre and performance, as well as creative interventions by queer people from the many immigrant and refugee communities that populate Quebec today.