La mise en scène de corporéalités subversives chez Dai Sijie et Ma Desheng : deux « ironistes » relus dans le contexte des Humanités Médicales ¹

Anchored in the field of the Medical Humanities, this article explores, through a comparative reading of selected works by Dai Sijie and Ma Desheng, two migrant writers of Chinese origin, the functions of laughter and of a “humour of resistance” (Boris Cyrulnik) as important resources of resilience in confronting the collective trauma of the Cultural Revolution and/or disability. We will observe that it is above all the imaginary of unrestrained bodies—antagonists to their trained and bloodless counterparts that dominate propaganda posters—that allows them not only to transcend the perspective of unproductive victimization and to (re-)claim agency in situations marked by unequal power dynamics, but also to ‘bare their teeth’ at their native China and, more specifically, Maoist ideology. While Dai Sijie, through the representation of bodies in their bare and non-idealized materiality, provokes a carnivalesque laughter that enables a shift in power dynamics between the dominant and the dominated, Ma Desheng, for his part, exploits the possibilities afforded by the performativity of language (including the language of the body) to make his body—disabled—the site of the only true revolution.