| Normality as it relates to the human body and its abilities remains unexamined in Francophone literature. Many critics maintain that normality's Western parent fields, disability studies and freak culture, are culturally inadequate for such an endeavor. Curiously, Francophone novels of the 1980s begin to pay close attention to the body and its relationship to normality and ability within particular cultures; grosso modo, these novels narrate normalities. This project enables the alignment of these otherwise divergent fields through a study of texts targeting three regions of the world---Francophone Canada, the Caribbean, and Africa. It does so by detailing how culturally specific concepts of normality influence the protagonists' bodies and their abilities, as well as how late twentieth-century novels expose the arbitrary nature of these normalizing constructs. More specifically, these texts reveal the manipulations into, out of, and around particular normalities that form and deform freaks of culture such as the conjoined twin, the exotic witch, and the bearded lady.;The opening chapter outlines how theoretical concepts of freak culture, normality, and bodily ability become, when removed of their own cultural specificities, useful tools for unearthing normalities rooted in texts such as Birago Diop's Senegalese tale, "Les mamelles" (1947). The second chapter inaugurates the study of the novel by revealing how the two-headed bilingual protagonist in Jacques Godbout's Quebecois novel, Les Tetes a Papineau (1981), falls prey to a normalizing mission. Race and spirituality are at the heart of the third chapter's exploration of Maryse Conde's Moi, Tituba sorciere...Noire de Salem (1986) where norms cross colonial zones in order to maintain the protagonist's Caribbean body and abilities as abnormal. Tahar Ben Jelloun's L'enfant de sable (1985) and La nuit sacree (1987) are the focus of the final chapter where, through an examination of Arab-Muslim norms of gender, sexuality, and ability, the deformation of the protagonist's body unveils the formation of acceptable and unacceptable Moroccan monstres de la culture. Through these readings, the ensuing pages hope to pave new paths for the study of Francophone literature as cultural bodies that share similar yet unique histories of language, normality, and identity. |
