Pathologizing Gilles: Discursive bodies in Thomas-Simon Gueullette's parades and 18th century Parisian fairground spectacles

"Pathologizing Gilles Discursive Bodies in Thomas-Simon Gueullette's Parades and 18th Century Parisian Fairground Spectacles:" traces the movement of Gueullette's parades through representational and discursive fields. Short farces featuring typical characters, the parades were usually presented as attraction pieces at the Parisian fairs. Their collection in Theatre des Boulevards (1756) and Parades Inedites (1885), both attributed to the magistrate Thomas-Simon Gueullette (1683--1766) provide the textual basis for this study.; The parades utilized theories circulating in social, scientific and medical arenas to create another type of knowledge: fictional and mythical. In them, daily reality was simultaneously reflected and subverted through the production of bodies that imposed their materiality on stage borrowing their organs from existing authoritative discourses. These corpo-realities proliferated through the re-configuration of various registers. Some of these fields were: public health and control; waste and excrement management in the city; surface appearance and shifting tenants on hygiene; sensationalist treatises: materialist doctrines and experiments on animation of dead matter; optical illusions, charlatanism and the exhibition of human phenomena; the training, function and regard of doctors in urban milieus; the desire for foreign narratives and the violence exerting the disappearance of the actual "other" in them; the constructed sexuality of prostitutes in philosophical, medical and literary writings, and the mystery of reproductive physiology.; The parades are postulated as tactical practices, which escaped regulatory mechanisms of the time and generated a vision of the performer which evaded interiority to target the virtuosity of the physical. Their mode of operation relied on the confusion of the senses, the amalgamation of theory and fantasy, and the circumvallation of the striated structures that rationalized and regulated the city. Attempting an approach concordant with this mode of operation, this thesis threads lines of critical analysis that are broken, at times, through tangential and returning fictions.