Description
Book SynopsisThis volume is based on papers given at the biennial Women in French conference held in Leeds in May 2011. Drawing on a range of interconnecting disciplines and forms of cultural production, it explores the relationship between French and Francophone women and the material world. Bringing together researchers from the United Kingdom, France and other Francophone countries, the book reflects the engagement of women researchers with contemporary debates.
The first section focuses on the female body, examining dance and the performing arts but also the material objectification suffered by rape victims in France. The next highlights the contradictions of the im/materiality of the body, the act of writing and the text, in terms of dichotomies, permeable identities and fluid boundaries. The third section turns its attention to the practicalities of ‘the material’ in relation to women’s engagement with the economy – the gendering of domestic work, women’s discourse, the precariousness of women’s employment and the alienating impersonality of consumer spaces. The concluding section considers the relationship of the female body to the material object, whether subverting, co-opting or indeed absorbing it. In the final chapters of the book the tactile and the visual converge in explorations of ‘the material’ in cinematic representations of the female body.
Trade Review«Overall, this volume amasses some fascinating snapshots of representations of women’s lived experience. It brings together both established and new writers and filmmakers, employs an array of theoretical paradigms, and poses difficult questions of its subject matter. It will be required reading for all thoses interested in women’s and gender studies, and in women’s cultural production.» (Natalie Edwards, Contemporary French Civilization 39.4, 2014)
Table of ContentsContents: Maggie Allison/Imogen Long: Preface – Hélène Marquié : Corps et mouvement : matière à subvertir le genre par la danse – Julia Dobson: Troubling Matters: Mannequins, Murder and Gisèle Vienne’s
‘corps troublants’ – Nicole Fayard: Bodies Matter: The Materiality of Rape in Twenty-First-Century France – Renate Günther: Bodies that Matter: Gender and Generation in the Work of Marguerite Duras – Gabrielle Parker: Writing an Immaterial World: The Case of Ying Chen’s Fiction – Imogen Long: Writing the Material World:
Le Féminin pluriel by Benoîte and Flora Groult – Jan Windebank: Domestic Labour: Maintaining the Material Space of the Home and Gender Identity in France – Sheila Perry:
Quand les femmes parlent argent: The Image of Women’s Relationship to Money and the Economy in Televised Political Debate – Maggie Allison:
Les Dessous de l’économie: Materializing Women’s Voices in Mariana Otero’s
Entre nos mains – Claire Humphrey: Mourning and Loss in Consumer Spaces:
L’Année suivante – Dúnlaith Bird: Selling the Skirt: Women’s Travel Writing and the Literary Market – Victoria L. Harrison: Fashion Material: Young Women’s Defiance, Devotion and Disdain in Occupied Paris – Kamila Bouchemal: The Objects of the Female Body in Malika Mokeddem and Gisèle Pineau – Lynsey Russell-Watts: Sexual Material: Catherine Breillat’s Bodily Cinema – Jillia Climo: Confounding the Visual - Looking at the Unlookable: An Irigarayan Reading of Catherine Breillat’s
Anatomie de l’enfer.
