From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women's Writing in French by Maria Tomlinson

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women's Writing in French by Maria Tomlinson Antonia Wimbush Tomlinson, Maria. From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women's Writing in French. Liverpool UP, 2021. Pp 232. ISBN 978-1-8-34-846-2. £90.00 (cloth). Maria Tomlinson's compelling new book, From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women's Writing in French, examines how menstruation, childbirth, and the menopause are represented in a range of contemporary fictional works by women writers from France, Algeria, and Mauritius. In her study, she draws attention to the potential of literature as a form of contestation and protest, arguing that since the twentieth century, women writers have sought to denounce "societal perceptions which stigmatize, marginalize, and undermine female bodily experience" (1). Tomlinson's original, cross-cultural, and comparative study brings together writers and texts from different geographical, social, and political contexts to spotlight key aspects of female bodily experience. The analysis, which draws on important discussions and debates within the feminist movement, is also inflected by sociological studies, ensuring that the work remain sensitive to the particularities of the socio-political context in which the women authors are writing. The book is structured geographically, with a separate chapter dedicated to literature from France, Algeria, and Mauritius. This structure is conducive to an intersectional approach, and in each chapter, Tomlinson reflects perceptively on how the sociocultural context, religion, and class, among other factors, influence the depiction of female bodily experience. It also enables conclusions to be drawn about how menstruation, childbirth, and the menopause are perceived in relation to each other within a particular society. The introduction gives a helpful overview of the study, its rationale and its methodology. It also explains why the author has chosen to study literature from these three Francophone countries: "not only do Mauritius and Algeria have a shared French colonial history, they have very different postcolonial cultural, [End Page 190] religious, political, and social compositions both to each other and to France" (9). Yet Tomlinson is also careful not to make France the central comparative point of the study. The introduction closes with an informative account of the use of social media by feminist activists in France and the Francophone world to promote body positivity. Chapter One outlines the theoretical framework of the study. It examines key concepts and ideas of French second-wave feminists, particularly Julia Kristeva and Annie Leclerc, in order to set up the thesis of the book; that is, contemporary Francophone writers are indebted to the work of the second-wave feminists, but they also nuance and update their ideas so that their writing is more intersectional. To elucidate this argument, Tomlinson also engages with postcolonial and intersectional feminists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Chapter Two examines female bodily experiences in writing from France, drawing attention to the medicalization of this literature and its focus on the violence and trauma inherent in the bodily processes. This chapter unites work by established authors, such as Virginie Despentes and Marie Darrieussecq, with lesser-known voices such as Laurence Tardieu and Mazarine Pingeot. The following chapter turns to Algeria and argues that women's experiences of menstruation, childbirth, and the menopause are affected by Islamic and patriarchal traditions at the heart of Algerian society. The chapter studies novels by Maïssa Bey, Nina Bouraoui, Leïla Marouane, and Malika Mokeddem, four of the most celebrated contemporary women writers from Algeria. Chapter Five examines writing from Mauritius, focusing on novels by Ananda Devi and Shenaz Patel. Religion and patriarchy influence bodily experience in these novels too, but unlike in Algeria, Francophone literature from Mauritius is inflected by the Hindu religion and Indo-Mauritian cultural traditions. Despite the differences across the large corpus, it is striking that many of the texts attend to the violence and trauma inherent in women's experiences of fertility. One of the strengths of the book is the detailed close reading of the novels. At times, only a few pages of a particular novel are dedicated to the female fertility cycle, but Tomlinson draws out...