Masculinity and gender minimalism in Georges Perec's A man asleep
Masculinity and gender minimalism in Georges Perec's A man asleep

Summary/Abstract: This article examines Georges Perec's A Man Asleep (1967/1990) through the concept of gender minimalism, rethinking how masculinity operates in narratives shaped by withdrawal, stillness, and reduction. The novel follows an unnamed student in Paris who abandons his studies, cuts himself off from social life, and drifts through a routine of sleeping, walking, watching, waiting, and doing almost nothing. His withdrawal does not develop into a clear rebellion, psychological confession, or search for renewal. It is presented through a stripped narrative form in which action and social attachment are steadily reduced. Building on this narrative premise, the article approaches the protagonist's disengagement as a sustained practice of narrative subtraction in which gender gradually loses its capacity to organise action and value. Engaging masculinity studies while remaining alert to the limits of its dominant frameworks, the analysis places Perec's novel against models that privilege performance, recognition, hierarchy, and reform. It argues that such approaches struggle to account for texts in which masculinity is neither affirmed nor openly challenged but becomes functionally irrelevant. Through close textual analysis, the article focuses on sleep, temporal suspension, indifference, spatial contraction, and bodily persistence as formal conditions that weaken masculine legibility without offering an alternative identity. The article concludes that A Man Asleep proposes no new masculine ideal and does not turn vulnerability into ethical insight. Instead, it stages a condition of neutrality in which masculinity survives only as residue, showing how literary minimalism can register moments when gender ceases to function as a meaningful organising principle.

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