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The chapters in this book were first presented at the Women in
French Biennial Conference held in Leeds in May 2004. The twelve
essays explore the multifaceted commodification of the female body
and provide insights into the mutations of French society and
culture. British and French scholars examine the paradoxes and
contradictions embodied in various images and discourses related to
health and illness from different perspectives, ranging from
sociological studies to analyses of working diaries, children's
medical encyclopaedias and literary texts. The 'resilient female
body' as epitomised by the First World War nurse tends by the end
of the twentieth century to be construed as the 'sanitised female
body', subjected to mind/body dualities largely controlled by the
medical professions. Thus, maternity and related issues such as
birth and contraceptive technologies figure as major themes with
contributors revealing unresolved ambivalences. Other chapters
focus on how women's economic activity can affect their individual
health and, potentially, that of others. A further prominent theme
shows how, for contemporary women writers, serious illnesses such
as cancer and madness in women can be seen as rich metaphors for
the ills of a male-dominated society. Duras's alcoholism and
Aragon's portrayals of prostitution are also discussed.
This volume is based on papers given at the biennial Women in
French conference held in Leeds in May 2011. Drawing on a range of
interconnecting disciplines and forms of cultural production, it
explores the relationship between French and Francophone women and
the material world. Bringing together researchers from the United
Kingdom, France and other Francophone countries, the book reflects
the engagement of women researchers with contemporary debates. The
first section focuses on the female body, examining dance and the
performing arts but also the material objectification suffered by
rape victims in France. The next highlights the contradictions of
the im/materiality of the body, the act of writing and the text, in
terms of dichotomies, permeable identities and fluid boundaries.
The third section turns its attention to the practicalities of 'the
material' in relation to women's engagement with the economy - the
gendering of domestic work, women's discourse, the precariousness
of women's employment and the alienating impersonality of consumer
spaces. The concluding section considers the relationship of the
female body to the material object, whether subverting, co-opting
or indeed absorbing it. In the final chapters of the book the
tactile and the visual converge in explorations of 'the material'
in cinematic representations of the female body.
Feminist approaches to questions of women, pleasure and
transgression have generally been premised on the assumption that
women's pleasures are typically constrained - if not ignored,
marginalized or forbidden - in patriarchal cultures. The naming,
foregrounding and pursuit of women's pleasures can therefore be
deemed potentially transgressive and linked to women's emancipation
in other realms. The essays in this volume draw on a range of
materials, from travel writing and the novel to film and stand-up
comedy, addressing the specificity of French and Francophone
approaches to women, pleasure and transgression across a range of
historical contexts. The volume is divided into three sections:
intellectual and creative pleasures; normative pleasures, that is,
pleasures conforming to women's conventionally expected roles and
status as well as to accepted views regarding race, national
identity and sexuality; and perverse pleasures, that is, pleasures
transgressive in their tendency to reject authority and norms, and
often controversial in their "excessive" appetite for violence,
sex, alcohol or food. In each case, questions are raised about how
we approach such pleasures as feminist researchers, motivated in
part by a desire to counter the notion of feminism and feminist
research as something "dour" or joyless.
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