Notes on a proto-queer Rachilde: Decadence,deviance and (reverse) discourse in La Marquise de Sade

Abstract

This article explores new ways in which the French female Decadent writer Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery Vallette, 1860–1953) may be profitably viewed as a ‘proto-queer’ writer. While previous published works argue for Rachilde as ‘proto-queer’ primarily by analysing her games with gendered language and gender inversion, this article contends that Rachilde's deployment of discourses of sexual perversion against the ideological grain places her writing into a queer genealogy. The argument is developed via a close reading of Rachilde's novel of 1887, La Marquise de Sade. Her use of female death-driven perversion as a strategy of anti-social critique in this novel can be productively read alongside recent queer criticisms of reproductive futurism such as those by Lee Edelman.