Queer(y)ing Bodily Norms in Francophone Culture

Polly Galis is conducting postdoctoral research at the University of Bristol, funded by the SFS Postdoctoral Prize Fellowship. Her project, Narratives of Pleasure and Protest by Francophone Sex Workers, explores the literature of three twentieth-century writers: Jeanne Cordelier (France), Albertine Sarrazin (Algeria) and Grisélidis Réal (Switzerland). Her monograph, Frank French Feminisms, is forthcoming with Peter Lang, as a winner of the 2019 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in French Studies.Maria Tomlinson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the department of journalism at the University of Sheffield. Her research project is titled Menstruation and the Media: Reducing Stigma and Tackling Period Poverty. She completed her PhD in French literature at the University of Reading. Her specialist areas are gender, feminism and queer studies. Her monograph, From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women's Writing in French, is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.Antonia Wimbush is a Leverhulme Early Career Researcher in French at the University of Liverpool, where she is investigating cultural responses to post-war French Caribbean migration. She completed her Midlands3Cities-funded PhD at the University of Birmingham. She has taught French language and culture at the Universities of Birmingham and Bath. Her monograph, Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile, is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.The three volume editors co-organized the conference «Imagining the Body in France and the Francophone World» at the University of Birmingham in January 2018, which served as an inspiration both for this volume and a special issue of L’Esprit Créateur (Summer 2020).

• CONTENTS: Polly Galis, Maria Tomlinson/Antonia Wimbush: Introduction – Queering the Body – Brian Troth: Hookups: Social Networking and Digital Bodies in Twenty-First-Century France – Adina Stroia: Lesbian Selves: The Figure of the (Body) Double in Marie Nimier’s Works – Ray Balstad: Children Out of Line: Gender (Dis)Orientations and Paths of Queer Resistance in the Heterotopia – Rethinking Gendered Bodily Norms – Kathleen Rizy: Motherhood Reconceived: The Posthuman Future Is Female in «Mon mari le clone» by Marie Darrieussecq – Vanessa Lee: The Female Body in the Plays of French Caribbean Women Writers – Seth Compaoré: Male Bodily Poetics in André Téchiné Quand on a 17 ans (2016): Physical Violence and Teenage Passion – Hybrid and Dysfunctional Bodies – Cristina Onesta: Dysfunctional Bodies, Dysfunctional Gazes: Artistic Creation and Death in Manger l’autre by Ananda Devi and Le Génie d’Abou by Isabelle Boni-Claverie – Sara Bédard-Goulet: 14 or the Missing Arm: Ontological Instability of the French Contemporary Novel in Jean Echenoz’s Work – Kate Foster: The Cyborg’s Undecidable Body: A Game of «Who am I?» in Gaston Leroux’s La Poupée sanglante – Bodies in Flux – Loren K. Wolfe: Mediating Eve: Female Protagonists and the Contingent Body in Hervé Guibert’s Late Narratives – Jennifer Boum Make: Exploring Encounters in Passages by Emile Ollivier: The Role of Testimonial Responsibility to Othered Bodies – Kathryn Chaffee: Dance as Encounter in the Films of Claire Denis – Polly Galis, Maria Tomlinson/Antonia Wimbush: Conclusion.

«In this timely and important collection, the editors bring together a series of reflections onthe body in contemporary French and Francophone cultures. Chapters consider a range ofpertinent topics, from the digital mediation of bodies and sexualities on social networkingplatforms, through considerations of current meanings of motherhood, to the perennialconcerns of bodily dysfunction, disease and death.» (Lisa Downing, Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality,University of Birmingham)«Emphasising the body as central to queer studies, this valuable collection of essays offers anattentiveness to specific cultural-historical, geographic and linguistic particularities that is oftenfound wanting in works of anglophone queer theory, thereby demonstrating the importanceof Modern Languages’ interdisciplinary, culturally specific approach to queer scholarship.» (Elliot Evans, author of The Body in French Queer Thought fromWittig to Preciado: Queer Permeability)