Airelle Amedro

Research

My thesis examines how vulnerability and victimhood are articulated in queer French contemporary fiction, particularly in the works of Édouard Louis, Constance Debré, Viriginie Despentes, and Wendy Delorme. Through a theoretical framework dissecting the punitive and marginalising nature of neoliberalism (Achille Mbembe, Loic Wacquant, Sarah Lamble, Oliver Davis), I analyse how neoliberal violence shapes their reading of sex, resistance, justice and community. Attending to Wendy Brown’s observation that politicised identities 'fueled by humiliation and suffering' are 'as likely to seek generalized political paralysis, to feast on generalized political impotence, as [they are] to seek [their] own or collective liberation through empowerment', I study how these authors resist or participate in the neoliberal discourse marginalising them.

Research Interests

• Queer and Feminist Studies
• Contemporary French Literature
• Political Theory
• Sex and Sexuality Studies
• Trauma Studies

Conference papers

• « Si c'est pas pour faire du sexe ou de la politique, laisse tomber » : Le mauvais sujet politique queer dans l’œuvre de Wendy Delorme, Prendre le politique au mot. Appropriations, réécritures et détournements stratégiques, Sciences Po Paris, Paris 3-5 December 2025

• 'This staying clean shit isn’t easy’: Challenging harm regulation narratives through queer ethics of care in Virginie Despentes’s Cher Connard’, Boundaries, borders, binaries and barriers, Contemporary Drug Problems Conference, Manchester, 27–29 August 2025

• ‘Est-ce que ça n’effraie plus les cadavres’: Queer practices and necropolitics in the writing of Édouard Louis and Constance Debré', Society for French Studies Annual Conference, July 2024.

• ‘I no longer saw my life as anything but a race I’d joined too late’: Infiltrations of neoliberal rationality in the works of Édouard Louis', Contemporary Cultural Responses to a Neoliberal World, University of Northampton, 13 June 2024.

• With Arthur Ségard, 'Monsters, wax and glitter: Alexis Langlois’s and Adam Pendleton’s queer kinships on screen', Forms and Feelings of Kinship in the Contemporary World, University of Warwick's Humanities Research Centre Conference, 27 April 2024.
• ‘I wish I could have been a fag’: Queer literary networks in negotiation in Constance Debré’s works', Queer and feminist relationships in contemporary fiction of Romance cultures, University of Vienna, 25-27 October 2023.
• ‘I don’t keep corpses’: On sustaining and resisting deadly literature in Constance Debré and Édouard Louis’s works', Spectres, spectrums and spectrality: New and interdisciplinary approaches to Comparative and World Literature, The British Comparative Literature Association Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Conference, University of Warwick, 12-13 October 2023.

Publications

• '‘This staying clean shit isn’t easy’: Challenging harm regulation narratives through queer ethics of care in Virginie Despentes’s Cher Connard’, Queer medical Humanities, peer reviewed, forthcoming 2027

• Guest editor, special issue dedicated to Constance Debré, peer reviewed, Modern & Contemporary France, forthcoming 2026
• Interview with Constance Debré, Modern & Contemporary France, forthcoming 2026
• Co-editor, ‘Deviations’, special issue, French Studies Bulletin, forthcoming 2026
• '“I’ve come a hell of a long way”: Displays of queer traumatology in Edouard Louis’s Writing' in Queer trauma and Comparative Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, peer reviewed, forthcoming 2026

Organised Conferences and Events

• Conference Assistant, Society for French Studies PG Conference, 2025
• Co-organiser, 'Irresistible Decay: Discourses of Death in Life from the 18th Century to Today', Humanities Research Centre, University of Warwick, 7 March 2025
• Panellist, Q&A led by Misha Zakharov, Screening Rights Festival, 2024
• Co-founder and co-convenor, Sex:Queer Research Network, a Warwick-based interdisciplinary and interdepartmental initiative
• Conference Assistant, Society for French Studies PG Conference, 2024
• Organising committee, M4C CDF initiative, Sex in Contemporary Media: An Interdisciplinary Conference, 4-6 October 2023
• Co-organiser, SMLC PGR Symposium 2023, 'Rethinking the Crisis across Languages and Cultures', 12-13 May 2023

Teaching

2024/2025:

• FR357: Sex and Sexuality in Contemporary French Writing
• FR1013: Modern French Language I Oral
• FR2014: Modern French Language II Oral
• FR201: Translation

Given lectures:

• Michel Foucault's Surveiller et Punir, The Story of Modern France
• Introductory lecture, Sex and Sexuality in Contemporary French Writing
• Two lectures on Mathieu Lindon's Ce qu'aimer veut dire, Sex and Sexuality in Contemporary French Writing
• Two lectures on Wendy Delorme's Quatrième génération, Sex and Sexuality in Contemporary French Writing
• Two lectures on Chloé Delaume's Mes bien chères sœurs, Sex and Sexuality in Contemporary French Writing

Previous years :

• FR121: The Story of Modern France

Scholarships and Awards

• HRC doctoral fellowship, 2024-2025.
• European Commission Excellence Award for event organising for the Science Summit 2022.
• Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership, AHRC Doctoral Award, 2022-2026.
• Kate Bertram Prize for Distinction in MPhil in Comparative European Literatures and Cultures, 2019.

Qualifications

• MPhil in European, Latin American and Comparative Literatures and Cultures, University of Cambridge, UK
• BA (Hons) in French and German, King's College London, UK
• Hypokhâgne A/L, Poitiers, France