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Matthieu Dupas

Assistant Professor of French

Matthieu Dupas is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian. After obtaining the Agrégation in Classics, he received a PhD in French Literature from the Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle (2015) and from the University of Michigan (2016). His teaching and research focus on gender and sexuality in early modern and contemporary French literature and society.

His first monograph, La Galanterie comme mode de vie: Amour, civilité et mariage dans Mélite ou les Fausses lettres de Pierre Corneille was published by Classiques Garnier in 2023, in the series « Masculin/feminin dans l’Europe Moderne ». The book addresses gallantry as a mode of social relations cultivated by elite members of French society under the absolute monarchy. The gallant ritual, which deliberately conflates courtship and civility, mediates interactions among men and women, notably the “exchange of women” between families under the guise of the love match. By casting men and women in a relation that is no longer hierarchical and theologico-political, but normative and “biopolitical,” the gallant ritual transformes the knight-servants and his lady into straight “lovers,” which implies a profound renewal of their modes of relationality outside and then inside the domestic sphere. This apparatus is one key moment in the emergence of “sexuality” and in what Foucault describes as its entanglement with “alliance” (or kinship) in the modern era, which has produced modern “heterosexuality.”

His second book project, tentatively entitled I is Love, asks to what extent the erotics of Neo-Classicism transformed gallantry into an authentic culture of love—that is to say, a culture that took love seriously and treated it as a central topic. This is a question that has been posed since the very advent of gallantry, and one that scholarship has never really resolved. The book argues that love did indeed acquire the status of truth in Neo-Classical literature, and in a typically “baroque” way, through the performance of a ritual that asserts the immanent and human nature of love but in a vocabulary normally used to denote its transcendent and godly origin. In seventeenth-century culture, love as an anthropological phenomenon becomes an “idol,” a false god.

He is also working on a third book project on contemporary literature, which argues that, by the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first, sexuality has ceased to operate as a heteronormative apparatus, not only because the heterosexual norm is no longer as prescriptive as it used to be, now that same-sex marriage has been adopted by so many countries, but also because, in a context where gender fluidity is promoted, the field of gender and sexuality is no longer a site where desire is recruited by power—thereby spawning, in reaction, various subversive “counter-conducts.”

 

Research interests:

  • Seventeenth-century French literature
  • Contemporary French literature
  • Feminist theory, queer theory, and gender studies
  • French Theory
  • Early modern political history and philosophy,
  • Contemporary auto-fiction and auto-theory
  • Contemporary queer literatures

Selected publications:

 

Recent Courses: 

  • French 335 | How Would They Say No? Female Consent in Seventeenth-Century Fiction and Drama (Spring 2024)
  • French 272 | Poetics of the Tragic in modern French Drama (Spring 2024)
  • French 210 | « Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir? » Making Love in French (Fall 2023)
  • French 430 | The Powers of Literature: From Sovereignty to Governmentality in Seventh-Century Fiction and Drama (Fall 2023)
  • French 492 | Beyond French Feminism: Theorizing Gender and Sexuality in France from Beauvoir to Preciado (Winter 2023)
  • French 386 | Queer Autofictions: Writing Gender in Contemporary French Fiction (Spring 2022) 
  • French 211 | “On connaît la chanson”: A cultural history of French Song since the Advent of Phonography (Winter 2022)
  • French 340 | Dissidence and Desire: the Sexual Politics of Absolutism (Spring 2021)