'In the margins is where I breathe': Queering the Double in Marie Nimier's Works

The author of an oeuvre imbued with hybridity and populated by a cast of distinctly eclectic characters, Marie Nimier has established herself as a creator who lives and thrives in the margins. In this paper, I discuss the de‐centering mechanisms at work within her writing through the figure of the double. I read the double as a manifestation of postmodern and psychoanalytical concepts of self which coheres with the autofictional project through the troubling of explicit dichotomies and the existence of porous borders explored by Nimier from within the realm of sexuality. The figure of the double appears as a site for the displacement of the sexual charge, a terrain where ambiguities and issues of identity are played out and interrogated. Nimier populates her univers romanesque with a series of doubles and intimations of extended selves, eschewing stable identity politics in favour of a self ‘aux marges flottantes’ through an active queering process. The refusal of binaries which appears as a consequence of the fluidity of self, aporetically conflated in the figure of the double, is marked by a distinct queer sensibility which I trace by exposing the subtle intimations of same‐sex desire recurrent throughout her writing alongside its manifest expression in Photo‐Photo.