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On Normalities: Narratives of Bodies, Ability, and Freaks of Culture in Twentieth-century Francophone Literature

Christian Flaugh’s research project on normality and freaks of culture (or, monstres de la culture) in Francophone literature starts from the fundamental position that identity arises from various norm-driven discourses of power. The question of identity for Flaugh is cultural, as is evidenced in his response to developments in the fields of disability studies and freak culture that highlight norm-driven discourses used to manipulate the human body and its abilities into categories useful to socio-cultural order. This very order reinforces in turn narratives of normality upon which a culture is based, thereby producing not only the ‘‘normal’’ subject but also its necessary corporeal opposite, the freak of culture. It is literary narratives of this freak of culture that Flaugh reads as evidence to support his claim that it is the socio-cultural manipulation of the body that produces a variety of cultural narratives—or normalities—throughout the Francophone world. One example is Flaugh’s analysis of the ways in which Arab-Muslim norms of gender are represented in two novels by Moroccan author, Tahar Ben Jelloun. Together, these texts recount the manipulations endured by the protagonist whose eventual inability to be woman and man provides the inevitable opposite of the able-bodied woman and man who can enfanter. Another means by which furthers his project is through a careful analysis of texts by Maryse Condé about Caribbean identities that, due to the authors’