Société matriarcale, société idéale? "Agency" et engagement dans "Chroniques du Pays des Mères" d’Elisabeth Vonarburg

Abstract

Building upon Judith Butler’s concept of “agency” (1990), defined as the capacity for action that emerges during variations and displacements of repeated norms, as well as drawing from Havercroft’s application of this notion to literature (2017), wherein different intertextual processes are identified as a form of agency in contemporary autobiographies, and Bruno Blanckeman’s concept of “implicated” writing (2015), which posits that various forms of displacement are common in “implicated” works, this article delves into the agency of feminist science fiction, particularly in Élisabeth Vonarburg’s In the Mother’s Land (1992). Within this narrative, various discursive techniques, such as intertextuality and the feminization of language, are employed to subvert normative gender roles, thus creating a sense of defamiliarization that directs the reader’s attention towards contemporary societal issues. The analysis of Vonarburg’s work encompasses three distinct levels of investigation: firstly, a thematic exploration that considers the inversion of gender roles in the “utopian” matriarchal society; secondly, a transtextual examination focusing on hypertextuality (parodies) and intertextuality (citations, allusions); and finally, a linguistic scrutiny, which delves into linguistic “novums” (Suvin, 1979).