The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women (review)

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maternal encounters: the ethics of interruption

What is Québécois literature?: Reflections on the Literary History of Francophone Writing in Canada

This thesis examines the representation of the female fertility cycle in contemporary Algerian, Mauritian, and French women’s writing. It focuses on
menstruation, childbirth, and the menopause. This study frames its analysis of contemporary women’s writing by looking back to the pioneering work of the
second-wave feminists. Second-wave feminist texts were the first to break the silence on key aspects of female experience which had thus far been largely
overlooked or even considered too taboo to mention. Over forty years since the publication of Annie Leclerc’s Parole de femme, this thesis seeks to
determine the extent to which more recent representations reveal a different perspective from second-wave feminist texts. Second-wave feminist works have been criticised for applying their ‘universal’ theories to all women,
regardless of their ethnicity, class, or sexuality. In response to this criticism, this thesis asks as one of its central research questions whether women’s
writing in French still represents female bodily experience as ‘universal’. Or, reflecting criticism of such universalising views, this thesis evaluates whether
contemporary women’s writing exposes differences between women’s experiences that were overlooked in second-wave feminist texts. The crosscultural and interdisciplinary approach is informed not only by critics of the
second-wave feminist movement but also by sociological and anthropological studies which consider how women’s bodily experiences are shaped by cultural context.
Contemporary authors whose novels are explored in this thesis include Maissa Bey, Leila Marouane, Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, Virginie Despentes, and Marie Darrieussecq. This study reveals that each literary culture frames its representation of the female fertility cycle in its own distinct cultural context. Overall, this thesis argues that contemporary women’s writing has
continued the challenge against normative perceptions of the body that was originally launched by the second-wave feminists, whilst also illustrating that female bodily experience is diverse.

The female fertility cycle in cross-cultural perspective:representations of menstruation, childbirth, and the menopause in contemporary women’s writing in French

La mémoire de l'eau

Voluntarily choosing not to have children is increasingly becoming a preferred life option in contemporary society. Yet there remains an inherent suspicion and pitying of women who do not follow wh...

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On the Margins of Motherhood: Choosing to Be Child-Free in Lucie Joubert’s L’Envers du landau (2010)

Between Languages and Cultures: Colonial and Postcolonial Readings of Gabrielle Roy

This article employs Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory to offer a new theoretical reading of Ying Chen’s fiction. The article demonstrates how nomadic theory provides us with the tools to understand Chen’s complex vision of subjectivity as one that defies unity, fixity, and coherence of any sort. Instead, Chen presents us with a figuration of the self that reflects the velocity and constant fluctuations of the twenty-first-century postmodern, or, indeed, posthuman society that we inhabit. Just like Braidotti’s nomadic vision of existence, Chen’s fiction explodes boundaries and challenges traditional views of the self.

“On s’occupe du multiple, on tourne le dos à l’unité”: Ying Chen and Nomadic Figurations of the Subject

But in our own flesh, though we bear diseases […]
Though we are eaten up of lice and worms,
And though continually we bear about us
A rotten and dead body, we delight
To hide it in rich tissue: all our fear,
Nay, all our terror, is lest our physician
Should put us in the ground.

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Illness and its Metaphors:Conceptualizing Cancer in Une mort très douce

Cet article discute des consequences de la maternite sur la subjectivite de la femme en se focalisant sur Un enfant de ma porte de Ying Chen, publie d’abord par Boreal en 2008 et ensuite par Seuil en 2009. Bien que ce roman ne constitue pas la premiere tentative de la part de Ying Chen d’examiner le theme de la maternite dans son ecriture, ce qui est interessant dans le roman Un enfant a ma porte, c’est que l’auteure nous donne acces a la voix de la mere au lieu de faire narrer son histoire par le biais d’un autre personnage. Cet article considerera l’idee de l’ambiguite maternelle ainsi que les obstacles auxquels la mere doit faire face dans la lutte pour preserver sa propre identite tout en s’occupant d’un autre.

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Julie Rodgers

Papers

On the Margins of Motherhood: Choosing to Be Child-Free in Lucie Joubert’s L’Envers du landau (2010)

Between Languages and Cultures: Colonial and Postcolonial Readings of Gabrielle Roy

“On s’occupe du multiple, on tourne le dos à l’unité”: Ying Chen and Nomadic Figurations of the Subject

Illness and its Metaphors:Conceptualizing Cancer in Une mort très douce

« Comment peut-on être moi quand on est Mère? » Une étude de la maternité dans Un enfant à ma porte (2009) de Ying Chen