Sexuality, Gender and the Other, in the novels of Michel Houellebecq

Abstract

In this article we try to analyse how Houellebecq “racializes” the referents of certain concepts such as “race”, “culture”, “species”, “ethnicity”. In his novels, he describes the social organization of the human community as a place of tension where the basic social structures of the contemporary consumer society are found. He paints a picture of the social imaginary of sexuality and gender, being at the origin of social practices, mentalities, tendencies, fantasies and imagination, which invite us to decipher an ideological position which first, present, in terms of intemperance, the sexual life in the society, and, installs second, some various discriminatory aspects: Occidental / non-occidental, male / female.