Morel, Geneviève <br/><br/>
Another Gender: On Edouard Louis’s Autobiographical Novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule  

 -  2015.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 23 
<br/><br/> Popular in France since the eighties, primarily for its contribution to social and political debates, and also owing to the progress of gender theory, gender is nevertheless regarded as a rather fuzzy concept by psychoanalysts, who possess more precise theoretical tools with which to clinically characterize the the individual’s relation to sex. The purpose of this article is to assess the psychoanalytical value of the concept of gender, without claiming that it was already implied in Freud, which would be an anachronism. The proposed method is to start from the speech of patients and from a reading of a recent autobiographical novel by Edouard Louis. Using the concept of interpellation, as defined by Louis Althusser in 1970 to characterize ideology, we examine the trajectory described by Edouard Louis within his writing. We contend that gender is the summation of the interpellations (often negative) received throughout one’s life in regard to the sexed nature of one’s being. The hero of the novel, Eddy, was able to overcome the insults he received as a child and teenager by creating for himself a new relation to his body, in the context of a different social class and educational environment. This metamorphosis was validated by the author’s officially changing his name just before his novel was published. We discuss and argue against Judith Butler’s thesis in her 1997 work Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, according to which the individual reappropriates gender interpellations through a reordering of identifications. On the contrary, we show that Eddy’s successful and playful reappropriation of his interpellations was only possible as the secondary result of a profound subjective change, linked to an irreversible action: Eddy’s decision to no longer believe in the values imposed upon him.