Women Matter / «Femmes Matière»

Maggie Allison is Honorary Visiting Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Bradford. Her research interests include the women’s press, sexual harassment and the role of women in politics. Among her co-edited volumes are several arising from Women in French conferences.Imogen Long is Lecturer in French at the University of Hull. Her research interests include the figure of the public intellectual in France and women’s writing. She has published work on Simone de Beauvoir, Danièle Sallenave and Françoise Parturier and her monograph Women Intellectuals in Post-68 France: Petitions and Polemics was published in 2013.

• Contents: Maggie Allison/Imogen Long: Preface – Hélène Marquié : Corps et mouvement : matière à subvertir le genre par la danse – Julia Dobson: Troubling Matters: Mannequins, Murder and Gisèle Vienne’s ‘corps troublants’ – Nicole Fayard: Bodies Matter: The Materiality of Rape in Twenty-First-Century France – Renate Günther: Bodies that Matter: Gender and Generation in the Work of Marguerite Duras – Gabrielle Parker: Writing an Immaterial World: The Case of Ying Chen’s Fiction – Imogen Long: Writing the Material World: Le Féminin pluriel by Benoîte and Flora Groult – Jan Windebank: Domestic Labour: Maintaining the Material Space of the Home and Gender Identity in France – Sheila Perry: Quand les femmes parlent argent: The Image of Women’s Relationship to Money and the Economy in Televised Political Debate – Maggie Allison: Les Dessous de l’économie: Materializing Women’s Voices in Mariana Otero’s Entre nos mains – Claire Humphrey: Mourning and Loss in Consumer Spaces: L’Année suivante – Dúnlaith Bird: Selling the Skirt: Women’s Travel Writing and the Literary Market – Victoria L. Harrison: Fashion Material: Young Women’s Defiance, Devotion and Disdain in Occupied Paris – Kamila Bouchemal: The Objects of the Female Body in Malika Mokeddem and Gisèle Pineau – Lynsey Russell-Watts: Sexual Material: Catherine Breillat’s Bodily Cinema – Jillia Climo: Confounding the Visual - Looking at the Unlookable: An Irigarayan Reading of Catherine Breillat’s Anatomie de l’enfer.

«Overall, this volume amasses some fascinating snapshots of representations of women’s lived experience. It brings together both established and new writers and filmmakers, employs an array of theoretical paradigms, and poses difficult questions of its subject matter. It will be required reading for all thoses interested in women’s and gender studies, and in women’s cultural production.» (Natalie Edwards, Contemporary French Civilization 39.4, 2014)