Women’s Fiction in Postfeminist France: Léonora Miano, Camille Laurens, and Chick-Lit or Romances urbaines

Abstract

Women make up a significant majority of fiction readers, in France as elsewhere, and the novel has long been – and remains – a widely shared medium that both reflects and reflects on gender norms and their effects on women’s lives. My paper examines three contemporary female-authored novels covering the spectrum from ‘literary’ to popular fiction, each of which might be described as a postfeminist story for a postfeminist France. The texts are: Camille Laurens’ Celle que vous croyez (2016); Marie Vareille’s Je peux très bien me passer de toi (2015); Léonora Miano’s Blues pour Élise (2010). My analysis asks in what ways the contemporary ‘women’s novel’ reflects postfeminist culture, in its negative sense as a market-oriented co-optation of feminist aims and achievements but also in its more positive sense, as a new stage in feminist struggles. To what extent can pleasurable fictions not only acknowledge the realities of a postfeminist climate, but also question and challenge them?