Contre-modèles de la masculinité dans les fictions de Georges Eekhoud

Georges Eekhoud’s work bears witness to the crisis of dominant masculinity. The alternative masculine models he proposes offer a reflection on the sexual and social behaviour associated with the bourgeois conception of a heteronormative society and paint a portrait of a deviant and fluid masculinity. This includes a virile and excessive masculinity, often assumed by a masculinised woman, as well as the libertarian and homosexual demands of fin de siècle anarchism. Violence and excess characterise the heterosexual behaviour of the characters from the urban sub-proletariat and the Flemish countryside, while homosexuality dominates in the underworld and among the aesthetic aristocracy who dream of a utopia in which man can achieve a liberated awareness of himself. The author of the first novel about open homosexuality, Escal-Vigor, Eekhoud overturns the codes and morals of the dominant ideology and provides models for breaking away, combining social anarchy and sexual anarchy as manifestations of freedom.