In this article, I analyze how two French female writers, Virginie Despentes ( Baise-Moi) and Marcia Burnier ( Les Orageuses), subvert the topos of rape and revenge by taking it out of the frame of pointless violence and hypersexualization of women to make it more universal and political. By embracing the codes of the genre in order to better transgress them, these writers are reinventing the genre. By showing how the female body can become a subject of desire and an actor of violence rather than an object of desire or a victim of violence, the two authors offer a more in-depth reflection on what rape and revenge are, and reveal in their novels the importance of friendship, sisterhood and mutual assistance between women to rebuild and reconnect with themselves after sexual assault.

This article examines filmmaker, author, and activist Amandine Gay's autotheoretical essay Une poupée en chocolat (2021). In this rageful text, Gay critiques the politics and violence of transracial adoption. Drawing from her own experience as a transracial adoptee, Gay challenges dominant narratives around kinship and expresses her refusal to conform to traditional family-making or biological motherhood. Her work is a form of activism in process, reclaiming agency amid systemic racism, institutional neglect, and personal crisis. She speaks of the three central pillars of her life – creation, activism, and research – through which she processes and contests these violences. This article focuses on the reparative function of anger and its potential as a generative force within engaged activism. It explores how anger, often pathologized as excessive, is refigured by Gay as a vital resource for challenging institutions that systematically disempower marginalized subjects.

During the Second World War, the Post Office was a key part of the French administration. Some employees were transferred to occupied areas and/or the Free Zone. These staff assignments and transfers were carried out by the « German-Vichy authorities », who suspected the employees of either passive disobedience or of joining the Resistance movement. There were many reasons for this disobedience. In the annexed zone, the insubordination of women from Alsace and Lorraine was directed against Nazi propaganda. In other zones, postal workers claimed pseudo-impediments and/or illnesses. The resistance of female postal workers is documented in administrative files on the relegation of staff and in other sources. As activists, they were the eyes, ears and hands of the Resistance. Their stories have been passed down through their post-war involvement in trade unions and the Communist Party.

Commitment, engagement, persistence, defiance, enlightenment, crusade–all characteristics, to be found in women whose activism has paved the way for the progress in politics in the French and Francophone context over two centuries. Concentrating on political activism and its gendered implications, this study will assess the extent to which women’s activism in the French context has conditioned women’s position in society, influencing perceptions of gendered roles. Focusing on French women in politics, it will demonstrate that, for them such engagement is itself a crucial form of activism, a commitment going beyond that of their male counterparts, illustrated in political, electoral events in France. It will examine contributions to politics and women’s involvement in public life via such figures as Hubertine Auclert, and, more recently, Élisabeth Borne, Valérie Pécresse alongside, in particular, Marine Le Pen.

This article explores the ecofeminist aesthetics of French singer-songwriter and performance artist Camille, whose work spans music, dance, film, and experimental vocal performance. Over the past two decades, Camille has drawn vocal inspiration from her embodied experiences of womanhood and motherhood, using her voice to highlight the generative, nourishing, and problematic relational connections between women's bodies and nature. Her artistic philosophy centres on the belief that the singing voice holds affective power to stimulate emotional, sensorial, and ecological connections. Through a close analysis of sonic childlikeness and musematic repetition in “Fontaine de lait” and “Seeds,” this article demonstrates how Camille employs ecofeminist tropes – such as breastmilk, seeds, and semen – to blur boundaries between human and nonhuman, male and female, and voice and body. Ultimately, Camille's voice emerges as a deliberately affective instrument that resonates across corporeal and cultural registers, challenging binary categories and inviting new forms of relationality.

In two recent films, Atlantiques (2009) and Atlantique (2019), Mati Diop responds to the contemporary migrant crisis – specifically to the migrations piroguières, the migration by small boat to Europe of young Senegalese men. The films explore the stories of the men who make this dangerous journey, and also attend to the women who remain behind, mourning those who die. This article examines the ways in which Diop uses sound to draw us into the ethical world of the films, engaging the spectator in a practice of listening which encompasses the linguistic and the sonic, as the films move from the fraught registering of testimony, to the sensual, sonic representation of the films’ setting, to the interweaving of historical contexts through the use of layered sonic tracks. In these ways, through sound, via voice, silence, and noise, Diop immerses us in a powerful encounter with the lives and afterlives of these young migrant men and the women who mourn them.