QUEER DESIRE: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL READING ON MONIQUE TRUONG'S THE BOOK OF SALT

• Main Authors: CHUANG, YI-HUAN, 莊易寰
• Other Authors: LEE, TSUI-YU
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/23t932

碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 107 === This thesis inspects the queer desire of the protagonist, Bình, in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt. With implicit queer aroma and Vietnam as a colonized subject, Bình hybridizes his repressed disposition throughout the novel. His aimless living in 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris and retrospect memories of Vietnam accumulates his diasporic individual. The novel represents Bình’s indecisive characteristics and his submissive existence. Is this feature constructed from the relation of the empire and colonized or the suppressed sexual identity forbidden from the social hierarchy of normality? This thesis tries to apply Lacanian psychoanalysis to explore Bình’s inner self and the process of his inner language transformation into action toward external world. Appropriating the concept of desire proposed by Lacanian and Deleuzian approaches, the thesis explores the potentiality of Bình’s queer performances. Last part of the thesis examines Bình’s queerness in Lacain’s three orders to discuss how Bình breaks through the impasse from the normality and searches for the sublimity with his queer identity.