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臺大外文系學術演講 - “I was born with a bike between my legs”: The Queering of the Transnational Western in Lola Quivorons Rodeo （Fareed Ben-Youssef） |
| 公告內容 |
NTU DFLL Faculty Colloquium
臺大外文系學術演講
Title: “I was born with a bike between my legs”: The Queering of the Transnational Western in Lola Quivorons Rodeo
Speaker: Dr Fareed Ben-Youssef （Texas Tech University）
Moderators: Drs Lilith Acadia and Alexander Paulsson Lash （National Taiwan University）
Time: 17:00–18:30 PM, Tuesday 7th April, 2026
Online Talk: https://meet.google.com/zxz-vjor-cae
Abstract: “I was born with a bike between my legs.” So declares the Guadalupan-French protagonist of Lola Quivoron’s Rodeo （2022） before they steal another’s motorbike. The queer hero, who calls themself Unknown, is “The Man with No Name” of this film set in the “urban rodeo” subculture of the Paris banlieue. Tropes of the western and noir nightmarishly comingle in Rodeo. Western sunlight illuminates Unknown as they joyfully ride and, later, noir shadows loom as they and their gang perform a daring mobile heist on what is dubbed the “stagecoach”— a truck filled with brand new bikes. Building on Campbell’s conception of the Rhizomatic West, of “intersections of many tangled lines… always bifurcating and crossing other others, forming and deforming,” this paper theorizes Rodeo’s singular queering of the transnational western. It performs formal analysis upon scenes where Unknown tenderly touches their motorbike’s saddle, caressing it with a care akin to how a western hero might touch their horse, and where Quivoron’s camera frames the bike as a temptation for their crime boss’ wife imprisoned in her home. The bike they were born with between their legs is their phallus—an emblem of power and mobility in a setting where they are trapped by their feminine appearance. The paper compares such moments against scenes where they undergo makeovers to pass as a benign woman, so they can scam men selling their motorcycles. Off their bike, Unknown cannot be liberatingly unknown, they can only be known as a woman. Rodeo, an astonishing transportation of the western myth to contemporary France, unveils the queer transnational Western’s value for genre and queer studies scholars. Quivorons film creates a prism to understand how the western offers a conceptual framework wherein those marginalized across the globe—marginalized across many tangled intersections—might briefly ride free. Trailer: https://youtu.be/F5iXef4071U?si=ka8eNnsyHVXhpTex
Bio: Fareed Ben-Youssef is Associate Professor in Film & Media Studies in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. He has frequently published on how Hollywood genre forms are repurposed and remixed by marginalized populations including in his book, No Jurisdiction: Legal, Political, and Aesthetic Disorder in Post-9/11 Genre Cinema （SUNY Press, 2022）. He is also the Film Review Editor of Surveillance & Society.
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