(Breaking out of) heteropatriarchal lockdown: Wendy Delorme’s Viendra le temps du feu

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Viendra le temps du feu [The Fire Era Shall Come] (2021), French author Wendy Delorme pursues her literary Wittigian Trojan Horse politics that critique and decentre heteropatriarchy. She uses speculative fiction to illustrate how the matrix of oppression and resistance functions within a heteropatriarchal system. While many class-, gender-, or race-based intersections grant privileges and/or cause disadvantages, marginalized communities have simultaneously used their subjugated situation as a basis for empowerment and resistance to hegemony. Viendra vividly portrays the meaning and deleterious consequences of being trapped within heteropatriarchy. Strikingly echoing recent lockdowns, the novel’s self-labelled safe, nurturing society is, in reality, a racist, sexist, settler colonialist, and classist prison, contaminating all but especially the most vulnerable ones. Still, the six protagonists demonstrate that alternatives exist, and one can break out of heteropatriarchy. They do so by producing subjugated and oppositional knowledge through their forbidden writings, recollections, storytelling, and actions. Metadiscursively, Delorme’s Trojan Horse politics also posit writing and literature as the ultimate defiance of and antidote for oppression. Centring women, gender non-conforming people, and sexual dissidents, Delorme has her readers identify with the most marginalized, thus, effectively decentring heteropatriarchy. As such, Viendra becomes like an antidote to heteropatriarchal and androcentric hegemony.