Deviant Bodies: Corporeal Otherness in Contemporary Wome's Writing

Abstract

In recent years, the body has emerged as a recurrent trope in literary works exploring issues related to migration, exile and cultural identity. Indeed, many authors currently living and writing in France have placed the ethnic minority body at the centre of their work in order to examine what Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla have called 'embodied deviance' the ways in which certain body types are figured as deviant in relation to the norm. 1 Although written in very different styles, the three texts to be discussed in this article Marlene Amar's La Femme sans tete (1993), Fawzia Zouari's Ce pays dontje meurs (1999) and Bessora's 53cm (1999)2all focus on the theme of corporeal Otherness. In each of these works, all of which can be described as forms of life writing, a young woman's attitude towards her body in the context of immigration or exile is used to address the relationship between the social body and its Others. Through their emphasis on rewriting, these works raise important questions about the ways in which the 'deviant' (ethnic) body is inscribed within the dominant cultural group, and all highlight the need for self-representation as a form of corrective vision.