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

The Body is Real but What We Think About it is Fiction

Although you currently look pathetic and probably won’t last long, it is important that you understand that being here makes you special, and when you’re out in public it needs to be visible where you’re coming from.1

In 2009, at the age of 16, I was accepted into a brief study trajectory at the cultish school of the Royal Danish Ballet. On one of my first mornings at the school and on my way to class, a teacher pulled me aside to enlighten me about the world I had now become a part of with the quote above. In all honesty, my interest in classical ballet was scarce and still is to this day, and as this would show to be the daily pedagogical vocabulary of my teachers, I did not stop to think further about it at the time. However, this brief interaction has returned to haunt my mind several times. 

Other than revealing the blatant sense of superiority and prestige associated with being one of the robotic ballet kids, this comment also cemented the fact that my body was no longer mine and had now become a domain of someone else’s fiction. Fortunately, my teacher’s forecast would end up being true, as I left the school six months later. While recalling this story, I am reminded of a short quote by theorist and artist Alina Popa, written in one of her final essays shortly before her death, “The body is real, but what we think about it is fiction.”2 While alluding to the “real” as the material properties of the body, such as flesh, bones, blood, and so on, Popa’s phrasing also precisely points to the conditions under which we inhabit our bodies, the body being a container where we manufacture and embody complex fictional realities. Made-up stories that we have cultivated over time until they settle within our collective nervous system as something true, and stick to our flesh, to a degree where deep processes of unlearning have to take place, for us to access re-narrations of the fictions that we have literally come to inhabit.3 Throughout this thesis, I will be taking a closer look at some of the fictions imposed on European and non-European bodies by the founder of Académie Royal De Danse, the Sun King himself, and the confidants surrounding him. Furthermore, I will investigate the potentialities of fiction and how this field might offer a potent space to disrupt and counter the stories posited by Louis within European dance.

It has been a while since I thought about him last, but while I was recently re-watching Mark Waters’ 2004 teen-flick cinema banger “Mean Girls,” I started thinking about the Sun King again.4 It struck me that, 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. Both were sovereign, absolutist rulers with megalomanic interests in displaying their superiority by harnessing the desires of their subordinates, turning fashion into power, and employing semiotic warfare through artistic territories, such as dance, to further their personal and political propaganda. To state it differently, Louis and Regina similarly build their empires through a series of successful fictional realities emptied out of any actual vital value to sustain life. 

Several significant events in history have been accredited to Louis’ name. With his close confidant, fellow mean girl, and minister of state Jean-Baptiste Colbert, he is widely acknowledged as the engine behind the French rise to superpower, becoming the most influential nation-state on a global scale at the time. One could even consider Louis the original Anna Wintour, as he and Colbert established the first known fashion magazine,5 which I guess would turn Colbert into Grace Coddington.6 Another one of Louis’ favorite pastimes was dance. As the founder of Académie Royale De Danse in 1661, he initiated a radical turn, leading European dance to become a professionalized field rather than amateurish court spectacles performed by the nobility. According to Richard Powers, the primary purpose of the academy was to refine and codify this new style of dance, centralize cultural power, and thus make everyone dependent on Louis’ dance academics.7 This new style would later lay the foundation for most forms of theatrical dances as we know them today in the West, such as classical ballet, modern, and contemporary dance.

Despite a multitude of negativities surrounding the realm of Louis, having been brought to light throughout history, his contributions to European dance appear to be narrated through, almost exclusively, uncritical generosities by Western academics. Moreover, the entangled affiliations between his establishment of Académie Royale de Danse and his colonial ambitions seem to be an entirely unstudied segment of his reign. I would speculate that this lack is caused by the narrow set of bourgeois, Eurocentric positions, from which he has mainly been examined, as these are predominantly the bodies enjoying access to his contaminated cultural legacy. In this thesis, I will therefore dwell on some of the insidious bodily fictions imposed by Louis XIV in his process of “refining” French and European dance culture and investigate how these fictions have categorically targeted bodies of the global south.

By now, the juxtaposition of Regina George and Louis XIV might feel unanswered, and I do partly include it as a form of entertainment, as it would simply be too boring to read another dry thesis on the royal subject. However, I do observe Regina to be a useful comparative figure in this context for various reasons. Firstly, she, as a comparative figure to Louis, gives me an efficient entry point into the blurry landscapes between fiction and reality. More precisely, when these two ostensibly opposite worlds start flirting with each other within Western historiography. Second, her mean-girl empire is an excellent gateway to better comprehend the reign of Louis, and lastly, the fictions installed in the figure of Regina are a great contemporary container through which to trace the ghost of the seemingly immortal King. Also, as the imagined reality of gender and misogyny have made it too easy for us to deem female characters, such as Regina George, the real mean girl. I want to try to counter this narrative by consciously misgendering Louis and thereby illustrate how the feminized mean girl is likely a misguided history. As a result, I hope this process will allow me to provoke cracks in the surface of Louis’ image and some of the excessively generous histories accounting for segments of his reign.8

To flesh out the character of the King and his associations 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, adding a particular emphasis on Louis’ foundation of Académie Royale de Danse and its colonial connotations.

Regina is Already Over it…

In exchange for using her as a comparative character, I created an imaginary within which I had to promise Regina that she could write a short entry note to give her consent:

Heyyy, Regina here. So ok, I don’t really know why I’m once again being dragged through the mud, like, why are you people so obsessed with me? It’s not like I’ve done anything since 2004, but you catty bitches really can’t let anything go. Whatever, I tried talking to the Sun King but he’s being a total biatch and I just can’t with him anymore. What is it they say? Two divas in one room are just one too many or something like that. Also, like ew, who would even choose that name? I guess he’s some sunburned freak from the seventeenth century that people claim I stole my identity from. I mean, people see me and they totally wanna be me. Why would I steal my identity from him? Have you even seen his skirts? They go all the way down to his knees and I’m like gross, but fine, if you wanna be fugly then go ahead…

xoxo

Regina

Several significant events in history have been accredited to Louis’ name. With his close confidant, fellow mean girl, and minister of state Jean-Baptiste Colbert, he is widely acknowledged as the engine behind the French rise to superpower, becoming the most influential nation-state on a global scale at the time. One could even consider Louis the original Anna Wintour, as he and Colbert established the first known fashion magazine,5 which I guess would turn Colbert into Grace Coddington.6 Another one of Louis’ favorite pastimes was dance. As the founder of Académie Royale De Danse in 1661, he initiated a radical turn, leading European dance to become a professionalized field rather than amateurish court spectacles performed by the nobility. According to Richard Powers, the primary purpose of the academy was to refine and codify this new style of dance, centralize cultural power, and thus make everyone dependent on Louis’ dance academics.7 This new style would later lay the foundation for most forms of theatrical dances as we know them today in the West, such as classical ballet, modern, and contemporary dance.

Despite a multitude of negativities surrounding the realm of Louis, having been brought to light throughout history, his contributions to European dance appear to be narrated through, almost exclusively, uncritical generosities by Western academics. Moreover, the entangled affiliations between his establishment of Académie Royale de Danse and his colonial ambitions seem to be an entirely unstudied segment of his reign. I would speculate that this lack is caused by the narrow set of bourgeois, Eurocentric positions, from which he has mainly been examined, as these are predominantly the bodies enjoying access to his contaminated cultural legacy. In this thesis, I will therefore dwell on some of the insidious bodily fictions imposed by Louis XIV in his process of “refining” French and European dance culture and investigate how these fictions have categorically targeted bodies of the global south.

By now, the juxtaposition of Regina George and Louis XIV might feel unanswered, and I do partly include it as a form of entertainment, as it would simply be too boring to read another dry thesis on the royal subject. However, I do observe Regina to be a useful comparative figure in this context for various reasons. Firstly, she, as a comparative figure to Louis, gives me an efficient entry point into the blurry landscapes between fiction and reality. More precisely, when these two ostensibly opposite worlds start flirting with each other within Western historiography. Second, her mean-girl empire is an excellent gateway to better comprehend the reign of Louis, and lastly, the fictions installed in the figure of Regina are a great contemporary container through which to trace the ghost of the seemingly immortal King. Also, as the imagined reality of gender and misogyny have made it too easy for us to deem female characters, such as Regina George, the real mean girl. I want to try to counter this narrative by consciously misgendering Louis and thereby illustrate how the feminized mean girl is likely a misguided history. As a result, I hope this process will allow me to provoke cracks in the surface of Louis’ image and some of the excessively generous histories accounting for segments of his reign.8

To flesh out the character of the King and his associations 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, adding a particular emphasis on Louis’ foundation of Académie Royale de Danse and its colonial connotations.

Regina is Already Over it…

In exchange for using her as a comparative character, I created an imaginary within which I had to promise Regina that she could write a short entry note to give her consent:

Heyyy, Regina here. So ok, I don’t really know why I’m once again being dragged through the mud, like, why are you people so obsessed with me? It’s not like I’ve done anything since 2004, but you catty bitches really can’t let anything go. Whatever, I tried talking to the Sun King but he’s being a total biatch and I just can’t with him anymore. What is it they say? Two divas in one room are just one too many or something like that. Also, like ew, who would even choose that name? I guess he’s some sunburned freak from the seventeenth century that people claim I stole my identity from. I mean, people see me and they totally wanna be me. Why would I steal my identity from him? Have you even seen his skirts? They go all the way down to his knees and I’m like gross, but fine, if you wanna be fugly then go ahead…

xoxo

Regina