Core reading

Guillaume Dustan, Dans ma chambre (1996) [Please buy the 2013 POL edition entitled Oeuvres I, which contains this text, and make sure you also read the Introduction by Thomas Clerc]

Advance preparation for seminar discussion

1. About what is Dustan affirmative in Dans ma chambre? To what extent does the book allow and encourage the reader to share his enthusiasms?
2. What, in your view, are the limitations of the author-narrator’s world-view?
3. How ‘open’ is the gay community (or culture, or subculture) presented in the text? (Who belongs and who doesn’t and why? How easy would it be to join this community?)
4. What are the characteristic features of Dustan’s pornographic writing?

Student presentation task: Is Dans ma chambre a dangerous book? Justify your answer by analysing examples from the text and relevant secondary literature.

Further reading

• Best, Victoria & Crowley, Martin, The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), ch. 3. See here for details of print copies. Click here for scanned extract.
• Davis, Oliver, 'Guillaume Dustan's "autopornobiographie": Is there room for trash in the queer subcultural archive?', in Alienation and Alterity: Otherness in Modern and Contemporary Francophone contexts, ed. by Helen Vassallo & Paul Cooke (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 59-76.
  
• Davis, Oliver, 'Leading by example: A queer critique of personalization and coercive community governance in Act Up-Paris’s operation against the bareback writers', Sexualities 18 (2015): 141-157. Available via the Library here.
  
• Evans, Elliot, 'Your HIV-positive sperm, my trans-dyke uterus: Anti/futurity and the politics of bareback sex between Guillaume Dustan and Beatriz Preciado', Sexualities 18 (2015): 127-140. Available via the Library here.
• Hendrickson, Daniel & Siegel, Marc, 'The Ghetto Novels of Guillaume Dustan', Paroles gelées 16, 1: 97-119.
  
• Kollias, Hector, ‘Guillaume Dustan, Master of the Drive’, Journal of Romance Studies 8:2 (2008), 113-130.
  
• Noguez, Dominique, ‘Rayon littérature universelle’, écritures 14 (2004), 93-97.
  
• Phillips, Adam & Bersani, Leo, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), chs. 2 & 4. Available via the Library as an e-book here.
  
• Preciado, Beatriz, Testo junkie: sexe, drogue et biopolitique (Paris: Grasset, 2008). See here.