Postgraduate student profile Benoît Loiseau

As a Tutor, I have taught French Literature and Civilisation, which examines a number of key issues relating to the Literature, Film and Politics of France since 1940, as well as Approaches to Visual Culture, which focuses on theories pertinent to contemporary visual arts. Additionally, I have lectured in Critical and Cultural Theory.

I also volunteer for UK queer youth charity AKT, where I provide career advice and mentorship to aspiring writers.

Grounded in literary criticism, philosophy and queer theory, my research is concerned with modes of (auto)fabulation in queer cultural production. Departing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical concept of fabulation (itself appropriated from Henri Bergson), my thesis envisages autofabulation as a form of resistance against dominant cultural discourses. Further, my research situates the concept of fabulation in relation to the literary phenomenon of autofiction and the autotheoretical turn in arts, writing and critical humanities. Through the work of queer artists and writers from the 1990s onwards, my thesis explores the ways in which the fictionalisation or ‘fabulation’ of the self is deployed across writing, film and performance as a countercultural strategy and technology of the self. The work of French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert, American artist and activist Gregg Bordowitz, as well as Spanish philosopher and curator Paul B. Preciado are central to my dissertation.