Close-up and Impersonal: Sexual/Textual Bodies in Contemporary French Women's Writing

Abstract

New women's writing in France persistently engages us in the meticulous observation of bodies. In this article I analyse the most' salient aspect of such observation, namely its overwhelming insistence on sexual experience. How do recent female-authored writings address the sexual body, and what are productive strategies for interpreting them? I refer to a range of works published since the early 1990s and concentrate especially on four: Catherine Millet's La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. (2001), Catherine BreilJat's Pornocratie (2001), Plaisir d'ojJrir, joie de recevoir (1999) by Anna Rozen and Et fes fevres et fa bouche (2002) by Marie-Laure Dagoit. 1 My purpose is to highlight some common strategies and effects in the writing of sexual bodies, to draw out the specificity of written representations of sex, and to suggest a productive proximity to the cinematic. Like much of the writing I explore, my primary consideration is the female body. I ask how female bodies are sexualized by women in literary texts and how such representations inflect reader/writer relations. In particular I explore the affective and political dimensions of the distancing procedures which characterize much contemporary body writing by women. Increasingly, this writing is forensic in focus and de-eroticized. Structural devices such as cataloguing, as well as narratorial detachment, frequently cut across the expected intimacy of sexual narrative and render re-mappings of the sexual body paradoxically impersonal. In 2002, Elisabeth Roudinesco notes the emergence of a pornography which she defines as puritanical 'dans la me sure OU elle livre une classification froide,