French Feminist Research Articles

Early-1970s Transnational Encounters between Italian and French Women: Desires, Legacy, and Contradictions of an Unspeakable Feminist Praxis

Abstract During the early 1970s, the Italian feminist movement opened up to foreign militant contexts. The two crucial interplays were with the American and French Women’s Liberation Movements. The aim of this article is to analyze from a transnational historical perspective the connection between Milanese activists and the French group Psychanalyse et politique led by Antoinette Fouque, which developed through several encounters during a period of a few days. From the French militants, the Milanese women learnt the political practice of unconscious which differed from the more diffuse consciousness-raising technique. From those meetings I reflect on general issues linked to the Italian and French feminist movements of that time: for instance, viewing the women’s separatist communal life both as a response to the New Left’s refusal to take on the peculiarity of women’s oppression and as the positive exemplification of the deconstructive claim that the personal is political. I also consider the contrast between the use of psychoanalysis and consciousness-raising practices, the significance of orality as a feminist means of communication, and the relationship between orality and the later trend of feminist bookshops. The ultimate goal is to understand the political effectiveness and limitations of the transnational feature of those encounters.

Contemporary music improvisation for silent film

This article explores how contemporary music improvisation for silent film both evokes and challenges the jazz canon by pushing the boundaries of genre, instrumentation, techniques, and collaboration while also engaging with the narrative and cultural contexts of the films. It draws from my practice-led research over the last twenty years, which has consisted of performing free improvised music in response to the screening of silent film, as a solo performer or as part of a jazz ensemble. The corpus of films used in the research spans animated shorts by Dutch director Gerrit van Dijk, surrealist shorts by Man Ray, German expressionist feature film by Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau, French feminist film by Germaine Dulac, and documentary and amateur archive film of the North West Film Archive in Manchester and the Media Archive for Central England in Lincoln. In the performances, while jazz is taken as primary influence, musicians often incorporate elements of other musics, make use of a broader range of instruments and of non-traditional sound sources beyond the typical jazz ensemble, and employ experimental techniques and unconventional playing methods that challenge and evoke the conventional improvisational norms of jazz. Musicians might opt to follow or contradict the narrative and emotional cues of the film, which can result in processes of music making that prioritize the exploration of the boundaries of storytelling over traditional jazz forms and structures. Across this research, I have observed how silent film improvisation has been attracting diverse audiences. This cross-pollination of audiences can introduce jazz to new fans and challenge preconceived notions about who jazz is for.

“Within the Borders of a Monastery” by Ekaterine Gabashvili: The Representation of Female Desire and the Feminine

Within the Borders of a Monastery is a story by Georgian feminist writer and activist Ekaterine Gabashvili (1851-1938). The goal of the paper is to explore the representation of female desire in the story. As Georgia was the part of the USSR, the humanities in Georgia were ideologized – the scholars would analyze literary texts from strictly Marxist point of view. Therefore, the process of reviewing Georgian literature from feminist perspective has started only recently. The paper contributes to the process and suggests an innovative reading of Gabashvili’s story. As Gabashvili thematizes hysteria and psychosis from feminist-psychoanalytical perspective and challenges gender roles, the paper uses the methodology of the Feminist Literary Criticism with French Feminist and the Gender Performativity Theories. The paper argues that the story depicts female desire as a destructive, incontrollable force which is pre-oedipal, opposes the Symbolic (i.e. the patriarchy) and manifests itself either through hysteria/psychosis or through the semiotic metaphors (e.g. dance). It transcends the female body and is connected to the feminine: the female and male protagonists (Salo and Tevdore, respectively) who love each other, experience and express their desire identically. The feminine is shown as a performative phenomenon through the androgenous male protagonist Tevdore. The opposition between the Semiotic and the Symbolic is reinforced through the semantics of space. The end of the story (the protagonists committing a suicide) reveals the theme of the story: banishing the female desire and the feminine from the symbolic order.

Becoming a Vidéaste: Media Practices Between Collectivity and Strategic Claims of Directorship in French Feminist Video Activism

Becoming a Vidéaste: Media Practices Between Collectivity and Strategic Claims of Directorship in French Feminist Video Activism

A Tribute to Professor Leon Yudkin (1939–2013)

Abstract This is a tribute to the Jewish literary critic Professor Leon Yudkin, who died in 2013. He was a prolific writer: the author of more than a dozen works and editor and co-editor of another five books. The range of his interests was prodigious, from individual writers like Shmuel Agnon, Joseph Roth and Else Lasker-Schüler to the Prague Circle, French feminist writers, German Expressionism and, above all, a series of authoritative surveys of Hebrew, Yiddish and Israeli literature. Much of this article focuses on his last book, posthumously published, Fiction Derailed: Form for the Modern (2020), an exploration of the modern novel. His greatest legacy was as a pioneer, someone who opened up the study of Jewish and especially Hebrew and Yiddish literature in the academy.

Contesting the universal claims of Western feminism: Black feminism and reproductive rights in France and the Overseas Departments (1960s–1980s)

This article sheds new light on the history of French feminism during the crucial period between the 1960s and 1980s, and it does by so opening up the range of actors as well as the geography and chronology considered. More specifically, it reconsiders the battles for reproductive rights: the liberalisation of contraception in 1967 and of abortion in 1975. Focusing on the perspective of those sitting on the margins of reproductive citizenship and of the standard narratives of the feminist movement – immigrant women and their organisations in France, and civil society groups in the Overseas Departments ( Départements d’Outre-Mer, DOMs) – as well as addressing the distinct reproductive regimes in the DOMs, allows for a reconsideration of French post-war pronatalism, and breaks away from what has long been the standard narrative of Western ‘second-wave feminism’, globalising and de-centring its history.

Of Women Who Move Forward: Sonia Rykiel’s ‘démode’

Through the central concept of movement, interpreted in three different ways, this article delves into the life and work of French fashion designer and author Sonia Rykiel, who treated fashion design as a form of transmedial écriture. Rykiel’s unruly and innovative concept of the ‘démode’ was launched in the context of a generational and relational movement of resistance against authority, liberating women from the changing diktats of the fashion industry (breaking out of generational hierarchies and frameworks of fashionable time). Secondly, it was an embodied and feminist movement, a democratization of fashion enabling the physical mobility of women who wore her skirts with undone hems, as well as reversible, adaptable jersey sweaters with exterior seams, central components of the démode concept. The démode also allows for a contextualization of Rykiel’s work with regards to the notions of écriture féminine and female pleasure as expressed by French feminists of her day, including Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Antoinette Fouque of the MLF (Mouvement de la Libération des Femmes). As such it is a breaking free of patriarchal structures, including garment construction, as well as breaking free of the masculinist ’68 revolution. Finally, the movement between different media, from garments to writing and “written garments” (transmediality) is analyzed as an artistic statement, expressing a desire to be both naked/ blank page as well as to write and to dress oneself.

Virginia Woolf s A Room of One s Own: A Foundational Feminist Vision in Euro-American Thought

Virginia Woolf’s seminal work, A Room of One’s Own, published nearly a century ago, is reexamined in this study as not only a feminist manifesto but as a feminist vision that anticipated some of the key features addressed in subsequent Euro-American feminist philosophies. Divided into three sections, the research offers a close analysis of Woolf’s text and its prescient insights, discussing separately the particular focal concerns of British, American, and French feminism, and elaborating on the ways these were envisioned and addressed as early as 1929 in Woolf’s visionary text. The study utilizes Showalter’s typology to analyze Woolf’s text and to organize elaborations on the points Woolf addresses and envisions that became fundamental within subsequent Euro-American feminist criticism, including the correlation between economic and social conditions and intellectual freedom, the necessity of women’s inclusion in the literary canon, and the significance of feminine discourse and gynocriticism. By highlighting Woolf’s remarkable foresight, this research positions A Room of One’s Own not only as a foundational feminist text but also as a profound feminist vision that continues to inform feminist thought today. This re-examination of Woolf’s work contributes to on-going academic discourse surrounding feminist theory and literary criticism.

French feminisms, global imperialisms—some historiographical reflections on writing Feminism’s Empire

ABSTRACT French feminisms and anti-imperialisms co-constituted each other in many ways in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Yet there exist few histories of the intersections of the period’s feminisms and empire, in either French or English. The absence of scholarship investigating the links between two major nineteenth-century ideological, social, and political forces raises myriad questions that emerge at the junctures of institutions, interests, power, epistemologies, politics, and history. Why the silences concerning the relationships between feminisms and imperialisms? How would analyzing their complex relationships alter our understandings of not only these two major conceptual frameworks, but also of gender, race, whiteness, religion, and class—and their intersections—during this period. My book, Feminism’s Empire, emerged from these questions; its central arguments engage, critique, and explain their intricacies.

More than Bread and Butter: French Feminists among Working Class Women

More than Bread and Butter: French Feminists among Working Class Women

A French Feminist Reading of Theresa Rebeck’s Spike Heels

This study discusses the complex personality of Georgie in Theresa Rebeck’s High Heels (1992) by depending on the feminist points of view of one of the French feminist practitioners, Luce Irigaray. A short introduction is given to illustrate the woman’s situation in this study while referring to the play. This paper is limited to the analysis of Georgie’s personality though employing some of Irigaray’s feminist ideas. Her dissatisfaction with her life and the patriarchal system will be the focusing points of this paper. Georgie’s motives and personal movements will be explained as a method to reach her dream.

“Combattre par le sourire les idées courantes contre le vote des femmes”: Humor as Coalition Building in Marthe Bray’s 1920s Feminist Postcards

Abstract: This article analyzes a collection of humorous postcards produced and distributed by feminist Marthe Bray’s Ligue d’action féminine pour le suffrage des femmes in late-1920s France. Each card features a colorful, humorous drawing on one side, a brief feminist text on the other, and a space where recipients could fill in contact information and return the card to become a league member. These cards set Bray apart from the interwar French feminist scene in two ways. First, Bray believed that using humor would breathe new life into what she saw as a flagging feminist movement. Second, distributing these cards in places frequented by both workingclass women and men would allow suffragists to convince a wide readership to support women’s suffrage. Ultimately, Bray’s postcards expanded her league’s potential to convince men to support the cause while also fostering political solidarity among women based not only on common oppression, but also on laughter and a shared vision for the future.

Ta dziwna różnica, zwana płciową

The purpose of this article is to reflect on the way narratives are produced in contemporary feminism dominated by the paradigmatic split between feminist and queer theory. This results not only in the inability to produce new concepts revealing the common genealogies of feminism and queer, but also in an internal division within social movements. Meanwhile, French feminist theory from the 1970s provides evidence that the epistemological rupture thesis is untenable. Paradoxically, it is gender difference, based on and at the same time transcending the psychoanalytic model, that contains the queer potential capable of breaking this impasse. The discovery of this common heritage of feminism and queer could therefore abound in new alliances and solidarities, not only at the theoretical level. Keywords: French feminism, queer theory, gender difference, bisexuality

Conceptual Spaces for Conceptual Engineering? Feminism as a Case Study

AbstractRecently, there has been much research into conceptual engineering in connection with feminist inquiry and activism, most notably involving gender issues, but also sexism and misogyny. Our paper contributes to this research by explicating, in a principled manner, a series of other concepts important for feminist research and activism, to wit, feminist political identity terms. More specifically, we show how the popular Conceptual Spaces Framework (CSF) can be used to identify and regiment concepts that are central to feminist research, focusing especially on feminism in France. According to the CSF, concepts can be represented geometrically, as regions in similarity spaces. A particular strength of the CSF framework is its empirically-focused methodology, which allows researchers to infer the boundaries of concepts from empirical data, thus eliminating the need to strongly rely on intuitions about meanings. This is shown to be especially valuable for the explication of concepts relating to feminist political identity, given that the intuitions of feminist scholars and activists about what would appear to be core concepts in the area tend to be poorly aligned or even conflicting. We report the results from an empirical categorization study conducted among French feminists and show how they support the view that the CSF can contribute to both the conceptual engineering project and our understanding of the structure of social reality.

Women’s Suppression or Empowerment? A Critical Study of Rubies for a Dog: A Fable

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the elements of suppression and empowerment of the women in a patriarchal society under critical circumstances. French feminist Simon De Beauvior’s concept of suppression of women is used as a framework for this research for the analysis of Husain’s short story Rubies For a Dog; A Fable. In The Second Sex (1988), she said; Women are not born they are made. In this short story, Husain raises her voice against the suppression of women in the patriarchal society. She gives voice to her female character Samira who fought for the freedom of her innocent father Wazir. She was bound to live in the palace as she is a female. She breaks the rules of patriarchal society and goes to see her father in jail after wearing the clothes of her father. She shaves her head and wears the clothes of her father so that she may look like a man. Her father wishes to have a son and she fights for her father like his son. She rebels against the patriarchal rules and does everything for her father and empowers herself. The deep study of the short story is used as a primary resource and different articles, interviews, magazines and books are also used as secondary resource. The study is significant because it explores the effect of suppression in form of empowerment. Women empower themselves when they are suppressed.

‘Je te crois’ (‘I believe you’): Pragmatics of a feminist slogan, or silencing and the scene of address in post-#MeToo France

In the context of a failure of #MeToo in France and in light of the intrinsic limitations of this movement, ‘I believe you’ has become one of the battle cries of contemporary French feminism, appearing on protest signs during activist performances and demonstrations, but also on street-pastings disseminated in urban spaces by grassroots feminist collectives. Through a pragmatic analysis of this statement-slogan paradoxically addressed to everyone singularly and to no one in particular, this article demonstrates the performative dimension of post-#MeToo French feminism which aims at once to individually repair and collectively denounce the wrong caused by the silencing of victims of sexual and gender-based violence. Building on Jean-François Lyotard’s philosophical elaboration of the phrastic mechanisms at stake in negationism, as well as feminist scholarship on believability, to demonstrate how the pragmatics of silencing throws survivors into a state of social death, I show how ‘I believe you’ – through the interplay of first- and second-person pronouns – allows the re-subjectivation of individual survivors who encounter it serendipitously in public spaces. Turning to the contextual analysis of activist configurations that have recently mobilized ‘je te crois’ in public space, I then show how this slogan creates feminist counter-spaces where the vulnerability of assembled bodies becomes the site of political subversion.

Rewriting French Feminisms: Muslim Women and Intersectional Storytelling with Fatima Daas and Faïza Guène

ABSTRACT As intersectionality has burgeoned into a buzzword, it has not always retained its origins in black women’s lives and standpoints. Unfortunately, criticisms of the concept can further marginalise longstanding histories of resistance to overlapping systems of oppression. This article examines the value of an intersectional lens on transnational French-Algerian feminisms. It analyses the stories that circulate about intersectionality and feminism in France, particularly a misleading tension between, on the one hand, universalism, national identity and French feminism, and on the other, intersectionality. To ensure a situated and embodied approach, the recent works of two French writers, La petite dernière by Fatima Daas and La discrétion by Faïza Guène, guide this article’s rethinking of the epistemological bounds of (intersectional) feminism. An analysis of how the authors engage publicly with feminism, how their characters navigate sexism, racism, and Islamophobia in Paris and how the works are received, reveals a productive tension between the plural modes of resistance and agency Daas and Guène present, and dominant French feminist discourse. I argue for the value of an intersectional lens in bridging this gap and enabling the lives of Muslim women to shape the feminist project and participate in the construction of the universal.

Writing Strange Letters in the Garden, with Love and Fury

French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous says, ‘the book is a letter on the run’ ( White Ink 177) and I too have taken the letters of two Australian women gardeners on the run to create my thesis. I grasped the letters between wildflower illustrator Kathleen McArthur and poet Judith Wright and ran with them. I held them close as I grappled to understand how contemporary Australian women’s digital garden stories might work to create conditions of community and worlds in common. In corresponding about their gardens, the poet and the artist developed a deep friendship that bloomed into a broader conservation ethic and action. Their letters and deep female friendship evolved into a question about how to live in harmony with the more-than human world. They would go on to play vital roles in the protection of places I hold dear: The Great Barrier Reef, K’gari (Fraser Island) and the Cooloola National Park. As I held these letters close and analysed my own thesis findings the world around me suffered increasing, human-caused, environmental catastrophe and I felt myself writing with both love and fury, much like Wright did. I began writing strange letters to Kathleen McArthur, alongside letters to my supervisor Professor Liz Mackinlay. Through these letters I searched for what gardens said and did and felt when they were turned into stories. What happens to garden boundaries in this time of environmental love and loss, and digital connection?

Situating senior women in film through positive reflections and sensuous touch: subverting Nichols’ The Graduate in Vernoux’s Bright Days Ahead

ABSTRACT As a French feminist subversion and contemporary reimagining of Mike Nichols’ classic American film, The Graduate, Marion Vernoux’s Bright Days Ahead (Les beaux jours) rebukes Hollywood for its general exclusion of leading women aged 40 or over and its Oedipal portrayals of them. Vernoux’s film subverts The Graduate by portraying the latter film’s adulterous affair between a younger man and an older woman through the woman’s eyes. Using Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage of development and Laura Mulvey’s explanation of how to overturn the male gaze of traditional film, this paper argues that Vernoux conceives a new language of desire for women, or a female gaze, in Bright Days Ahead through the younger lover’s positive reflections on the older woman, Caroline (Fanny Ardant) and close-up images of sensuous touch between Caroline and her younger lover. Scenes of touch between Caroline and her lover were filmed in extreme close-up as they mutually caressed one another. The film’s overall messages are that some men will always be philanderers, but women do not have to accept them, and women including actresses can be sexual throughout their lives.

Feminist counterpublics and media activism in contemporary France

ABSTRACT In this work, I shall analyse the transformation of media activism in the field of French feminist counterpublics, from the 1970s to the present. Based on Jürgen Habermas’s and Nancy Fraser’s conception of the public sphere, and centred on the French case, I shall study the passage from a pre-digital feminist counterpublic, defined by intellectual journals and theoretical debates (1970s), to a digital feminist counterpublic, dependent on the Internet and social networks, and with a more pragmatic approach to feminism (2010s). I shall argue that this transition involves the mutation of the ‘universal intellectual’ and the emergence of new modes of political intervention such as the ‘media intellectual’ and the ‘informational activist’. The continuities and discontinuities between both historical moments will be observed, as well as the different degrees of immersion in the basic parameters of the digital culture by contemporary French feminist political interventions.