Chapter Two - We’re Not Here and We’re Not Queer: Bisexual Erasure and Stereotyping in French Young Adult Fiction

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter, I discuss seven works of French young adult (YA) fiction featuring bisexual characters: five stand-alone novels, and two books from a series. Bisexuality is a topic that has not been addressed in extant literature on queer YA fiction written in French, and one in which, as a bi woman myself, I have a personal interest. In my analysis, I explore the epistemic construction of bisexuality within these novels; that is, the ways in which the depiction (or non-depiction) of bisexuality and bisexual characters contributes to a supposed body of ‘knowledge’ about bisexuality, both within and beyond the novels. I identify a number of themes in the corpus, namely: bisexuality as a ‘problem’; bisexual erasure; stereotypes and the ‘bisexual plot’; and bisexual people as ‘normal’ and straight-passing.

When I began conducting preliminary research for this chapter, it quickly became apparent that very few French-language YA novels with bisexual characters were available. Many of the limited number of titles included in bibliographies and booklists were translations from English, and one blogger noted that bisexuality is still ‘appallingly neglected’ in YA literature (Gabriel 2018, n.p.). The advantage, from a research perspective, of this otherwise disappointing situation was that it gave me a defined corpus to work with. For this chapter, I have chosen to focus on YA novels originally written in French and published in France during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Epstein (2013, 238) suggests that LGBTQ+ books for children and young people tend to reflect the legal and social realities of the countries they are written in, and I was thus interested in looking at more recently published books, as France has seen substantive legal changes affecting LGBTQ+ people over the past two decades (discussed further below). Picture books, middle-grade works or graphic novels might well portray bisexuality differently from YA novels, while texts written and published in other Francophone countries (such as Canada) would have a different social, cultural and legal context.