Louis Schou-Hansen ~ Regina George of the 17th Century: On How the Sun King Messed Us Up and the Potentials of Counterfactual History

Thesis Advisor: Ana Teixeira Pinto

Thesis: Regina George of the 17th Century: On How the Sun King Messed Us Up and the Potentials of Counterfactual History

May 2024

ABSTRACT

What if Louis XIV had been a trans-feminist, applying queer and non-Western epistemologies to his process of initiating new and radical directions within European dance?

While I was recently re-watching Mark Waters’ 2004 cinema banger Mean Girls, it made me think about Louis XIV. Despite being alive and ruling in vastly different periods, one in fiction and another in reality, the imperial strategies employed by the protagonist, Regina George, to gain power suddenly did not seem so far from the imperial strategies employed by Louis XIV to build upon his French empire in early modern Europe. One of these potent alignments can be found in Regina’s staging of herself as a superior figure in the Santa’s Little Helper high school dance scene. Similarly, Louis displayed great fascination for the domain of dance as a means to promote his personal and political propaganda by hijacking the sun as his alias.

Although Regina, as a comparative character to that of Louis, might seem misplaced, I will, throughout this thesis, utilize her to comprehend the reign of the King while trying to re- historicize him as the ultimate mean girl of the seventeenth century, emphasizing his endeavor with dance. Additionally, I will use this juxtaposition as an entry point into the blurry landscapes between fictional and factual worlds, posing critical questions towards the notion of objectivity within Western historiography. To further flesh out the character of the King and his association with what I will define as mean-girl methods, my research will venture into the sociability of desire through a Hegelian paradigm and semiotic warfare by taking several detours into the power fields of bitchyness, fashion, Versailles, and dance, in particular Louis’ foundation of Académie Royale de Danse and its colonial connotations. Finally, my thesis will attempt to trace the seemingly immortal ghost of the King, to create a counterfactual vacuum that will potentially carry the spatial prospect through which he can be recovered, once again, as a mortal entity.

Author Louis Schou-Hansen