Framing silence: the Nazi persecution of gay men in Michel Dufranne and Milorad Vicanović-Maza’s graphic novel, Triangle rose (2011)

Michelle Bloom (Professor of French & Comparative Literature, University of California, Riverside) will give a talk on Tuesday, March 25, at 5:00pm in Toy Lounge (Dey Hall). The talk is titled “Framing silence: the Nazi persecution of gay men in Michel Dufranne and Milorad Vicanović-Maza’s graphic novel, Triangle rose (2011),” which combines Holocaust studies, queer studies, French studies, and comics studies. Professor Bloom is the author of Contemporary Sino-French Cinema: Absent Fathers, Banned Books, and Red Balloons (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), which examines the crossover between France and East Asia (especially Mainland China and Taiwan) in film, and Waxworks: A Cultural Obsession (University of Minnesota, 2003), which examines wax figures and wax museums in literature, cinema, history, and popular culture. She has also published on Truffaut and Henry James; Baudelaire and Wagner; Balzac and Champfleury; Villiers and Zola.

Writer Michel Dufranne and illustrator Maza’s French-language graphic novel, Triangle rose, (2011) features a Berlin homosexual deported under Paragraph 175. In this frame narrative, the elderly survivor’s story never reaches its potential diegetic audience, Parisian students, including the protagonist’s great-grandson. The framed narrative represents the protagonist’s unarticulated memories. This narrative glitch reflects 1) the historic failure to acknowledge homosexuals as legitimate Nazi victims, and 2) ongoing homophobia in Berlin and Paris, resulting in shame, as conceptualized by Sara Ahmed and Ruth Leys. Portraying the Nazi persecution of gay men, Triangle rose highlights an important, underrepresented chapter of National Socialist history.

Please join us for a buffet-style dinner in Toy Lounge (Dey Hall) after Professor Bloom’s talk.

This event is sponsored by the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, the Center for European Studies, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, the Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Department of Art and Art History, and the Department of Romance Studies.