Francophone Women Research Articles

Drawing African Diasporic women anthropologists in dialogue: Decolonizing the canon

AbstractInspired by the use of naming and portraiture together in the Black artivism–such as that protesting the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor–this paper reflects on the use of portrait drawing as a practice of genealogy. While working on a project to raise the visibility of scholars and their works in the African Diaspora, specifically Francophone women anthropologists, I felt compelled to draw their portraits. Drawing African Diasporic women into dialogue from the archive attends to temporality, vision, and listening, elements centered within anthropological practice, but also implicated in the attachment of the discipline to colonial logics, particularly of allochronism, objectification and silencing. The multisensory, embodied and slow practice of drawing alongside reading scholars' works allows for diasporic time‐travel, shifting the gaze, and constructing a decolonizing “listening genre”.

Women and exile narratives in Maryse Condé and Gisèle Pineau's Francophone Caribbean novels

One of the most prevalent issues in francophone literature is exile and its impact on the postcolonial identity formation of French colonised society. However, there is limited space for the voices of Francophone women writers to speak about their exile. This article draws on the autobiographical novels by Caribbean Francophone women writers Maryse Condé and Gisèle Pineau. The research method used is comparative cultural studies to look at the tension between the discourse of the centre and the periphery in postcolonial literature. This article shows that both writers have different exile experiences but still centre on the clash of postcolonial identities between the people of the former colonies and the colonial government. Both novels also represent the realities of francophone societies that continue to be confronted with questions of cultural roots, homeland, and cultural roots that gradually disappear under colonialism.Keywords: Caribbean, exil, female, francophone

Textualizing the Maison de retraite in Contemporary Narratives by Francophone Women Authors

In Care Home Stories, Sally Chivers and Ulla Kriebernegg emphasize the need "to tell new and better stories about institutional care," arguing that retirement homes provide "a cultural repository for fears and hopes about an aging population" (17). This article examines the diverse ways in which "nursing-home-narrative fiction" (Life 191) by Francophone women authors raises critical questions about longevity and the ethics of care. Given their strong emphasis on modalities of care and their call for dignity and respect, these engaged narratives constitute powerful examples of "protest literature" (Gullette 80) and, as such, make a significant contribution to humanistic gerontology.

Writing the Landscape: Exposing Nature in French Women’s Fiction 1789–1815. By Christie Margrave

The feminist recovery project in francophone women’s writing is decades behind its anglophone counterpart and this book makes an important contribution to the field. Christie Margrave’s analysis of women writers’ feminist engagement with the ­Romantic vogue for natural landscape not only offers a fresh perspective on Romantic ­luminary Germaine de Staël; it also sheds light on the novels of Félicité de Genlis, Sophie ­Cottin, Barbara von Krüdener, and Adélaïde de Souza. These writers remain astonishingly under-researched, despite their considerable renown during the First Republic and First Empire, and notwithstanding vital work by scholars such as Gillian Dow, Isabelle Brouard-Arends, and Mary Seidman Trouille. Margrave illuminates the mutual influence of all five Romantic-era women and their canonical male contemporaries, demonstrating that the women reconceived fashionable landscape imagery to confront and challenge the patriarchal norms, restrictions, and prejudices which shaped the female condition and informed their writing. The subtitle, ‘exposing nature’, refers to Margrave’s analysis of natural landscapes but also to the centrality of what she calls, adapting Virginia Woolf’s famous phrase, ‘a landscape of one’s own’ (p. 1 et ­passim), a fictional topography representing the contours of women’s lived experience. Although the monograph would have benefited from a stronger feminist theoretical framework, Margrave’s work is rich in fascinating detail about the ­landscaping vogue and language of flowers, and this thorough research underpins persuasive and pivotal close readings. Occasionally, these readings are limited by her tendency to interpret the novelists’ commentary solely in terms of gender and sexual politics. In the case of Souza’s Adèle de Sénange (1794), for instance, the emphasis on gradual reform could easily be read as a political metaphor, especially in light of the recent Revolutionary Terror. On the whole, however, Margrave’s literary-critical acumen is impressive. Chapter 3, ‘Landscapes of Rebellion: Natural Madhouses’, is particularly effective, placing forensic analysis of the works of Cottin and Krüdener in the context of nineteenth-century attitudes to mental illness to demonstrate how landscapes function to portray female madness as feminist protest. Another highlight is Chapter 5, ‘Writing the Landscape: The Ossianic North and the Debate over ­Women’s Writing and Education’, which analyses Scottish landscapes as well as implicit and ekphrastic allusions to James Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’ poems in Cottin’s Malvina (1800) and Staël’s Corinne (1807). Connecting the eponymous heroines with the Ossianic female bard, Malvina, Margrave demonstrates that, even as Cottin and Staël depict ­women writers suffering social exclusion and psychological torment, they also engage in ­meta-commentary on their cultural importance. In a particularly innovative reading of Corinne, she argues convincingly that the love affair between the heroine and the British Lord Oswald models the synthesis of social independence (Corinne) and political liberty (Oswald) that could free future generations to live on terms of political and gender equality. She goes on to demonstrate that Staël depicts Corinne taking up the legacy of Ossian’s Malvina, making her the doomed prophet of this ideal. This is an insightful, valuable, and timely study bound to inform and inspire future ­scholarship in French women’s writing of the Romantic era.

Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves by Natalie Edwards

Reviewed by: Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves by Natalie Edwards Araceli Hernández-Laroche Edwards, Natalie. Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves. Routledge, 2021. ISBN 978-0-367-15032-7. Pp. 184. Much has been written about the relationship between power and language. Cardinal Richelieu understood the power of standardizing the French language and literature. His legacy lives through l’Académie française, established in 1635. However, what or who are we excluding when our assumptions about French literature are grounded on unexamined monolingual perspectives? One of the ambitious aims of Natalie Edwards’s pioneering work is “challenging the monolingual paradigm of French literature” (15). Edwards successfully shifts our monolingual focus by exploring contemporary female writers who demonstrate the vibrancy of polyglot eruptions, relationships, hybridity, borrowings, and co-creations through the more intimate genre of life writing in French. Influenced by recent theorizations on multilingual learners by scholars from bilingual education, linguistics, and other disciplines, such as Ofelia García on translanguaging, Edwards challenges us to probe our archive of French literary understandings in more asset-based directions: “[O]ne of the main proponents of translanguaging underscores the ability of bilinguals to transform the two languages they inhabit, suggesting that the term ‘conceives of language relationships in more dynamic terms’” (16–17). Edwards urges us to engage with French literary productions from a more linguistically inclusive perspective as she explores the translanguaging of six contemporary multilingual authors who highlight power dynamics, gender, war legacies, colonial history and postcolonial environmental conditions, indigenous struggles, the porousness of national borders, and the voluntary and forced migrations of so many lived experiences, complicating hybrid identities. The title of Lydie Salvayre’s historical fiction, Pas pleurer, is in itself an example of the way in which Spanish syntax (No llorar) exerts an influence on the spoken French of a character with Alzheimer’s disease, especially when recounting the trauma of the Spanish Civil War after decades of living in France. Translanguaging in Salvayre’s text “restores the stories of the forgotten, the overlooked, the illiterate and the linguistically ‘weak’ to the public domain” (48), Edwards convincingly argues. Kim Thúy’s work, described as a récit de soi based on Vietnamese immigration in an already multilingual Québec, adds French to the more common Anglophone representations of Vietnamese refugees in literary and cultural works. Texts such as Mãn suggest that “the French language can be viewed differently, as a product of other linguistic encounters over time, and that it will continue to be adapted by individuals for their own communicative purposes” (69). Similarly insightful are the explorations of Indigenous or Creole influences and negotiated or impossible translations in the fiction of Catherine Rey’s Francophone Australia, Gisèle Pineau’s Caribbean translanguaging, and Chantal Spitz’s solidarity with the [End Page 260] Tahitian language and eco-struggles within French dominance. Hélène Cixous’s linguistic repertoire is less explored in scholarship but not in Edwards’s analysis of her polyglot childhood in French Algeria, which was immersed in French, Spanish, Arabic, Yiddish, German, and English. Monolingual environments seldom exist. Diverse linguistic appreciation unearths cross-cultural infusions layering any local and globalized setting. French multilingual women writers not only decenter France as a literary center, they also successfully move readers beyond monolingualism. [End Page 261] Araceli Hernández-Laroche University of South Carolina Upstate Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

Advancing Online Teaching: Creating Equity-Based Digital Learning Environments by Kevin Kelly and Todd Zakrajsek

Reviewed by: Advancing Online Teaching: Creating Equity-Based Digital Learning Environments by Kevin Kelly and Todd Zakrajsek E. Nicole Meyer Kelly, Kevin, and Todd Zakrajsek. Advancing Online Teaching: Creating Equity-Based Digital Learning Environments. Stylus, 2021. ISBN 978-1-62036-722-3. Pp. xv + 248. While the move to online teaching caused by the Covid-19 pandemic was sudden (March 2020), the push to online teaching will continue to increase. For many French instructors, the notions of diversity, equity, and inclusion are on our minds due to the global reach of French, and our continuing efforts to include other French-speaking cultures into our teaching. This volume successfully incorporates inclusion, learning equity, and universal design for learning (UDL) into course design, writing course outcomes, course structure(s), activities and assessment. Thus, Kelly and Zakrajsek’s work helps French teachers to create an “instructor presence,” address different modes of learning, augment multiple paths for student success, and create the human connection our students crave. Many will appreciate the evidence-based ways to make adjustments to online courses, concrete teaching tips, and the differentiation between assessing teaching and student learning. The authors convincingly argue that to “advance online learning,” we must “teach in an increasingly inclusive, equitable, and compassionate way” (3). Divided into three parts, the first section concisely defines underlying concepts such as UDL, fostering human connectedness, and equity. It also addresses (re)writing SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-Related) learning outcomes for equitable, inclusive online courses, and suggests concrete ways to establish a transparent organizational framework. To optimize engagement with course content, emerging technologies prove crucial to many. Best practices include aligning activities and assessment strategies with desired outcomes. The second section of the volume provides useful ways of promoting respectful, engaging discussions and other meaningful, often interactive, online activities. French teachers all invest immense time building authentic and engaging learning situations. Learning to manage student and instructor expectations through workload management strategies while assuring truly diverse, equitable and inclusive learning environments is essential to our well-being. The final part of the volume aids us to make effective adjustments to our online courses. A growth-minded approach to teaching online underlies the authors’ suggestions. Useful recommendations for authentic assessment of both our courses and of student learning translate well to our discipline. The complete bibliography, lists of URLs and applicable technologies are helpful. The strengths of this work are multiple: its usefulness for experienced and novice online instructors, its solid theoretical grounding, as well as a truly inclusive approach that includes Quality Matters (QM) considerations and goes beyond. Together, these features can remind instructors of essential factors for all students, including the building of a respectful equity-minded learning community. Suggestions of engaging, inclusive thinking, and diverse discussion and other activities prove applicable for language and more advanced French students. For teachers seeking primarily French-speaking examples or French-focused tools to create safe classroom environments [End Page 211] welcoming LGBTQIA+ students, this volume will prove less useful. Rethinking the French Classroom: New Approaches to Teaching Contemporary French and Francophone Women (Routledge 2019) and Teaching Diversity and Inclusion: Examples from a French-Speaking Classroom. (Routledge 2021) better serve that purpose. While not targeting those specific lenses, this current volume should prove useful to French teachers as they design and enact their online courses. [End Page 212] E. Nicole Meyer Augusta University (GA) Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

Embodied Antillean women

This article explores the intersection of gender and cultural identities in two novels, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972) and Suzanne Dracius’s L’Autre qui danse (1989). Through comparative and close analyses, this article demonstrates that these two Antillean francophone women writers reject and renegotiate sexist and essentialist tendencies, in particular the auto-exoticization and disembodiment of women characters across the body of Antillean literature. These tendencies are notably present within Antillanité and Créolité, two dominant concepts of twentieth-century Antillean literature and thought. This article first explores these two writers’ responses to auto-exoticization, demonstrating how their literary treatment of women’s sexuality diverges markedly from hypersexualized portrayals of women by certain Créoliste authors. The article also examines the representation of Creole cuisine and language, and calls into question Antillean literature scholar Celia Britton’s argument that these two elements tend to reduce Antillean texts to ‘edible’ objects of exotic pleasure. In its second section, this article investigates Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacité. It suggests that Schwarz-Bart and Dracius adapt Glissant’s opacité to present women as impervious human subjects whose bodies do not make them exotic stereotypes but rather figures of resistance to masculine violence and colonialism.

Activistes féministes: Francophone Women Writers and International Human Rights

Several prominent contemporary Francophone women writers have embraced activism in compelling forms. In her written creations, Maïssa Bey from Algeria has continually called attention to the lack of women’s rights in her homeland; she has also initiated writing workshops for women to reflect and express themselves. Fatou Diome, who left Senegal for Strasbourg, has shed light in her work on racism and sexism that African immigrants often face in Europe, and she has created an association in her homeland to help individuals become financially solvent. Yanick Lahens from Haiti has similarly devoted herself to activist endeavours on her island, including co-founding a library and working with youth after the earthquake. As these authors seek to create compassion through writing, they also promote empathy through their engagement outside the text, empowering people of various backgrounds by providing them with literacy skills, business acumen, and a sense that their story matters.

Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves. By Natalie Edwards

<i>Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves</i>. By <scp>Natalie Edwards</scp>

Rethinking the French Classroom: New Approaches to Teaching Contemporary French and Francophone Women ed. by E. Nicole Meyer, and Joyce Johnston

Rethinking the French Classroom: New Approaches to Teaching Contemporary French and Francophone Women ed. by E. Nicole Meyer, and Joyce Johnston

Le métier d’institutrice indépendante francophone à Montréal, 1869-1915

En 2006, nous publiions dans le périodique français Histoire de l’éducation, no 109, un article intitulé « Les premières enseignantes laïques au Québec. Le cas de Montréal, 1825-1835 ». Ces enseignantes, anglophones en majorité, tenaient de petites écoles essentiellement privées dans lesquelles était instruite une importante composante de la jeunesse montréalaise. S’inspirant du modèle implanté par ces récentes immigrantes britanniques, des maîtresses laïques francophones ont suivi cet exemple. Elles vont peu à peu s’approprier ce modèle d’institutrices indépendantes et aussi le poursuivre au XIXe et même au XXe siècles. Elles ont ainsi participé par leurs écoles, souvent petites, à l’éducation d’une frange significative de la jeunesse notamment au XIXe siècle, et ce, en dépit de l’implantation de la Commission catholique de Montréal en 1846. Aussi nous a-t-il semblé pertinent de nous attarder dans ce texte à l’apport éducationnel de ces enseignantes et ce, plus particulièrement, à celui des années 1869-1915.

Christiane P. Makward &amp; Judith G. Miller, eds. and trans. Plays by French and Francophone Women: A Critical Anthology

Christiane P. Makward &amp; Judith G. Miller, eds. and trans. Plays by French and Francophone Women: A Critical Anthology

The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn by Tanella Boni

severe relapse, yet moments of epiphany emerge as if hurled from the crevices of Broken Glass’s mind. Mabanckou is surgical with his use of incoherence—faint allusions will reward the most patient of readers as the text unravels. Perhaps only comparable to his own memoir, The Lights of Pointe-Noire (see WLT, Sept. 2016, 99–100), Broken Glass reflects Mabanckou’s concern with an individual ’s ability to digest the worst experiences living may propose. No chronicle is particularly critical, but each one dives deep into the persistence of survival when only the sparsest threads of it remain. There is no individual considered without damage, many to an irreparable extent, but their tales convey an undeniable meaning, one that Mabanckou readily distills within his text. Broken Glass is not Mabanckou’s best work, but it is a welcome reissue for anyone to trace the author’s present success. Throughout the text lie hallmarks of Mabanckou’s career, and in tandem with The Lights of Pointe-Noire, Broken Glass is one of the best jumping-off points to explore the auteur. Daniel Bokemper Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Tanella Boni The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn Trans. Todd Fredson. Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2018. 73 pages. I was introduced to the riveting work of Tanella Boni, a critically acclaimed Ivorian poet and novelist, while reading A Rain of Words (2009), considered the first comprehensive bilingual anthology of poetry written by women from French-speaking Africa. Aware that English-speaking readers hear so little from francophone African poets, let alone francophone women poets, I was drawn to Boni’s female point of view describing the ethnocultural violence tearing apart Africa, in general, and the Ivory Coast, in particular. The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn is Boni’s first full-length volume of poems to be translated into English and continues Boni’s quest to find “letters / for the perfect word.” The age-old conflict between good and evil is played out in Boni’s juxtaposition of such themes as the magnificence of the natural world, young lives full of promise, and the “rare pearls in the water of Kindness,” with the current Ivorian political state of affairs, where “the hands of plenty . . . / weave their barbed wire” and where “daily lives [are] placed among the objects for sale / at the market rapacious for our distressed skins.” This compact collection is composed of two main sections, entitled “Land of Hope” and “A Murdered Life,” with units that can stand alone but which work together to create a powerful and almost overwhelming narrative of horrific proportions. Boni’s language is restrained and sparse, but a deep lyricism infuses the texts. None of the poems are titled, and, except for a capital letter at the start of each unit, there is no other punctuation. Though Boni never gives in to self-pity or hopelessness, neither does she allow herself the luxury of giving in to false hope. Indeed, while she maintains a desire Moniza Alvi Blackbird, Bye Bye Bloodaxe Books After being shortlisted multiple times for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Award, and many others, Moniza Alvi returns with this surreal, whimsical collection of poetry inspired by her parents, and particularly by her father’s emigration from Pakistan. A succession of elegant shape poems imitating the wings and branches associated with their avian subjects, these poems pay homage to Alvi’s formative figures through the eyes of both child and adult. Ben Berman Then Again Vine Leaves Press This fascinating set of tryptic prose sketches by US author and poet Ben Berman is barely the size of a pamphlet, yet it contains worlds. If you have ever wondered what it would be like to walk through the succession of portals so many children’s cartoons present into a multitude of lives, each lasting merely a surveyed minute, this pocket book is for you. Crossing the world both geographically and personally, the title belies itself—no two are the same. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 79 for hope, she is careful to differentiate a desire for hope and hope itself. Unflinchingly , she ends the book on a somber note: “How to...

Voicing the Vagabonde: Revindications and (Mis)appropriations in Contemporary Francophone Literature

In royal proclamations, legal and medical texts, and even newspapers, the vagabond is seen in France from the sixteenth century onwards as a shadowy figure who, according to sociologist Jean-Francois Wagniart, does not write and speaks little (Wagniart 1999: 9). This effacement is even more striking in the case of the female vagrant or vagabonde, doubly excluded by virtue of her gender and her sexuality. Historically associated with prostitution, marginalised and officially despised, this article explores the attempts by contemporary Francophone women writers Colette and Isabelle Eberhardt to recuperate the image of the vagabonde in their travel writing and autobiographical fiction, appropriating her image as a feminist forbearer or attempting to harness her illicit appeal. Their texts appear, however, to paradoxically reproduce the modes of repression they seek to circumvent, perpetuating the hierarchy of powerful writer and silenced vagabonde, or the conflation of vagabonde and prostitute. Through close readings of selected texts, this article questions therefore whether it is ever possible to truly voice the vagabonde.

The Contemporary Hero in Sylvie Kandé’s Epic of Futurity, La Quête infinie de l’autre rive

The Contemporary Hero in Sylvie Kandé’s Epic of Futurity, La Quête infinie de l’autre rive Alexander Dickow (bio) While scholars like Lynn Keller and Evie Shockley have devoted significant work to women’s epics in English, no similar scholarship exists on Francophone women writers, for lack of a comparable corpus. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and H.D. provide the beginnings of an Anglophone lineage that culminates in contemporary works such as Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette. By contrast, Sylvie Kandé’s Neverending Quest for the Other Shore: Epic in Three Cantos (La Quête infinie de l’autre rive: épopée en trois chants), published by Gallimard in 2011, is practically alone as an epic in contemporary French and Francophone literature by both women and men. Kandé is a Franco-Senegalese scholar and poet who has lived in New York for more than twenty years. In the Neverending Quest, she recounts at least two stories: that of the early 14th-century Emperor of Mali, Bata Manden Bori, known as Abubakar II or Abu Bekri II, and that of the thousands of African migrants who attempt to reach Europe. According to Kandé’s foreword, Abubakar II launches a massive expedition to explore the ocean to the West of Africa, never to return (13–14).1 The first two cantos recount the misadventures of Abubakar’s expedition, which include an attempted mutiny. Kandé imagines several versions of their final fate, including arrival in the Americas. The migrants’ expedition to European shores occupies the third and final canto. The migrants travel on a dangerous boat referred to as a patera. Originally a kind of shallow, flat-bottomed [End Page 399] vessel, the term has come to designate any boat carrying clandestine immigrants. The fate of these migrants, after the many travails of the passage to Europe, remains uncertain at the end of the epic, when a coast-guard vessel overtakes the patera and leads away the migrants, perhaps to a detention camp to await deportation. What kind of epic is Kandé’s Neverending Quest? In his well-known discussion of the genre, David Quint proposes a model of two competing epic traditions, the epics of the winners and those of the losers. But Quint’s victor or vanquished, winner or loser dichotomy tends to suggest a too-rigid conceptual dualism. I propose instead that epics vary widely (and not dualistically), particularly with regard to their temporalities. In other words, epics display representations of present, past, and future specific to each epic (but partially determined by their larger traditions, whether Greek, French, African, etc.). Sylvie Kandé offers the example of an epic of futurity. Rather than dealing in foundations and commemoration as epics often do, Kandé’s deals in becomings and unfoldings, potentialities and possibilities. Kandé participates in what Rachel Blau DuPlessis has called, with reference to many long poems by women, revisionary mythopoiesis (105–122). Yet in the act of rewriting the histories of Mali and clandestine migrants, Kandé suggests that history in general is always in process, always being renegotiated, that history is itself part of the future as much as the past. Futurity is also evidenced in her heroes, who are always still in the making, a promise rather than a gift. Kandé orients her epic toward the future in order to launch a communal ethical project: she ultimately demands that her reader carry on the task of reimagining an authentic contemporary hero. The Neverending Quest in context: an epic among epics As a matter of course, theoretical treatments of epics and the epic tradition turn on issues of temporality, historical consciousness, and their relation to narrative or lyric form. More than any other genre, the epic’s literary form manifests as an allegorical projection of a conception of history. In this view, a cyclical narrative (for instance, Saint-Amant’s unusual Moïse sauvé [Moses Saved]2) reflects a cyclical vision of history as eternal return. A radically digressive shape (like Byron’s Don Juan) contests historical teleology to suggest that history leads nowhere in particular. Finally, [End Page 400] an empire-building, end-oriented tale of relative ideological coherence (the Aeneid) implies a similarly end-oriented...

Kate Averis, Isabel Hollis - Touré (eds), Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women's Writing

Kate Averis, Isabel Hollis - Touré (eds),<i> Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women's Writing</i>

Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women’s Writing. Edited By Kate Averis and Isabel Hollis-Touré.

This rich collection explores literary representations of women’s mobility in the context of accelerating transnational movement and widespread social and political anxiety about border-crossings. In their knowledgeable Introduction, the editors recognize the historical tendency to depict mobility as a masculine phenomenon and the need to engage with the specificities of women’s movement, before suggesting how representations of women’s mobility might rethink traditional associations of women with home and nation, trouble categories of movement and the genres associated with them, and give expression to new modes of female subjectivity. The book’s twelve chapters and Afterword bring together distinguished and emerging scholars to reflect on the work of a variety of writers whose real or imagined journeys span the French-speaking world. Appropriately the book begins at home with Isabel Hollis-Touré’s subtle analysis of women’s sense of estrangement from their domestic environment — an estrangement that may catalyse movement — via a consideration of the work of Cameroonian author Léonora Miano. The interior exile that motivates or results from movement is a key theme of the collection as a whole. Jeannette den Toonder explores the psychological displacement of the migrant in her reading of Vietnamese-Québecoise Kim Thúy’s poetic prose, while Siobhán McIlvanney’s chapter on Algerian writers Malika Mokkadem and Maïssa Bey focuses on the ways in which women trapped in a rigidly patriarchal society are forced into an imaginative ‘internal exile’ in which the mind travels beyond the material constraints of the present. Indeed, one strength of the collection is the care with which the contributors reflect on different modes of movement — virtual and real, chosen and forced, legal and illegal, perilous and playful — and the ways these intersect and overlap. In his insightful chapter on women’s writing in post-earthquake Haiti, for example, Charles Forsdick pays close attention to differential forms of displacement and embeds his readings in an intersectional understanding of mobilities as shaped by class, ethnicity, and gender. Furthermore, while contributors are attuned to the subversive potentials of female mobility — see, for example, Dúnlaith Bird’s engaging analysis of Isabelle Eberhardt’s ‘vagabondage’ — the limits of notions of nomadism as liberation are also recognized. Christopher Hogarth’s study of Fatou Diome considers the Senegalese writer’s tempering of her early portrayals of successful female migration, while Jane Hiddleston’s compelling reading of Leïla Sebbar emphasizes the persistent sense of loss and rootlessness that flows beneath her apparent embrace of hybridity. The final chapters explore the potential of francophone women’s writing of mobility to construct new forms that do not merely reflect on the world but act within it: Anna-Louise Milne elegantly presents the playful possibilities of Louise Kaplan’s ‘transnational poetics’, while Margarita Alfaro identifies what she calls ‘ectopic literature’ with the creation of a modern female myth that re-imagines the relationship between the individual and democracy. This diverse collection breaks down traditional categories of displacement to produce a more precise and variegated landscape of inter- and intra-cultural movement and the itineraries of those who move through it. As such, it is both valuable and timely.

Mobility and stasis

Transnational mobility constitutes a frequent feature of much contemporary francophone women’s writing whose origins lie in territories with historical links to French colonial power. Yet whether configured as exile, migration, travel, or other, the experiences of transnational mobility described in postcolonial francophone women’s writing frequently focus on protagonists in childhood and early adulthood: the experiences and challenges of the exile, migrant, or traveller are seldom imagined in these texts as those of an individual in late adulthood or old age. This article analyses the intersection of ageing, mobility, and femininity in Abla Farhoud’s Le Bonheur a la queue glissante (1998), one of few narratives in French to broach the question of female ageing in migration. Reading the text in light of Sara Ahmed’s insights into the relationship between strangers, embodiment, and community (2000), the analysis reveals Farhoud’s challenge to any easy correlation between mobility and youth, and stasis and ...

Exploring Canadian women's knowledge of and interest in mifepristone: results from a national qualitative study with abortion patients

IntroductionAlthough Canada decriminalized abortion in 1988, significant disparities in access to services and an uneven geographic distribution of providers persists. Health Canada registered mifepristone, the gold standard of medication abortion, in July 2015. Our study explored Canadian women's knowledge of, interest in, and perspectives on mifepristone prior to registration. MethodsFrom November 2012 through July 2015 we conducted in-depth interviews with 174 Anglophone and Francophone women from Alberta, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Ontario, and Quebec about their abortion experiences and their opinions about medication abortion. We purposively recruited participants from different age cohorts and different regions within each study province to explore a range of perspectives. We analyzed these interviews for content and themes related to mifepristone using both deductive and inductive analytic techniques. ResultsThe overwhelming majority of participants had no knowledge of mifepristone at the time of the interview. However, after providing a brief description of an evidence-based mifepristone/misoprostol regimen, more than half of the participants reported that they would have considered this method had it been available at the time of their abortion and most would have been comfortable receiving medication abortion care from a family physician or nurse practitioner. Most women supported the approval of mifepristone and felt Canadian women would benefit from having more options for early pregnancy termination. ConclusionAlthough knowledge of mifepristone among recent abortion patients was low, considerable interest in medication abortion exists. Expanding awareness-raising efforts and supporting the approval of evidence-based regimens and provision of mifepristone appears warranted. ImplicationsThe approval and introduction of mifepristone for early abortion in Canada promises to increase options and access. Creating tailored and culturally and contextually resonant messages about mifepristone is of high priority. Promoting evidence-based protocols and the inclusion of a full range of qualified professionals in service provision is also warranted.

At the Intersection of Gender and Language: Why do Francophone Women have Lower Levels of Political Participation?

ABSTRACTIn Canada, research has found few differences in levels of political participation between Francophones and Anglophones despite traditional differences in resources leading to participation. This study argues that it is when gender is considered alongside language that differences emerge. Differences in conditions between Francophone and Anglophone women may mean that the explanations for the gender gaps differ. Findings show that Francophone women in Québec have lower levels of political participation than Anglophone women and men across Canada. These gender gaps are small but significant. Differences in resources and involvement in voluntary associations help account for Québec Francophone women’s lower participation. Additionally, these results indicate that the different political context and the different political influence of the women’s movement in Québec matter in determining explanations for gender gaps in political participation.