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Focusing on representations of women’s experiences in contemporary France, ‘Taking Up Space’ examines how women inhabit a variety of work spaces. It also speaks to the importance of cultural productions in calling out labour issues affecting women, as well as in offering a platform that allows us to imagine a future where inclusive and equitable work spaces are the norm. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological use of objects, the book explores women’s experiences through different metaphors of the door related to labour. The contributors demonstrate how doors are not only closed or open, but also serve as a threshold. Taken together, the chapters convey how women’s work experiences can range from states of oppression to survival and celebration, and demonstrates how through deliberate stances and actions, various work spaces can become sites of liberation and revolution.

University of Wales Press

French and Francophone Studies

‘Taking Up Space’: Women at Work in Contemporary France

Audrey Evrard

Precarious Sociality, Ethics and Politics: French Documentary Cinema in the Early Twenty-First Century brings an original perspective on French cinema’s ‘return to work’ in the early twenty-first century, focusing on the transformation of cinematic activism in view of the rapid dissolution of class narratives and solidarities. It is argued that, reckoning with widespread anxieties about job insecurity, social uncertainty, loss and invisibility in French society, filmmakers catalysed new modes of intervention, best described as embodied praxes of sociality. Combining rigorous film analyses with concepts borrowed from philosophy, sociology, geography and political theory, this study positions documentary as a privileged point of articulation between aesthetics, politics and ethics. The wide-ranging film corpus features well-established auteurs (Agnès Varda, Raymond Depardon, Denis Gheerbrant) and less canonical filmmakers to celebrate the vitality of contemporary French documentary cinema and its creative contributions to international discussions about work, precarity and social resilience.

Precarious Sociality, Ethics and Politics: French Documentary Cinema in the Early Twenty-First Century

Margaret E. Gray

Who has not, in a favored moment, ‘stolen the limelight’, whether inadvertently or by design? The implications of such an act of display – its illicitness, its verve, its vertiginous reversal of power, its subversiveness – are explored in this book. Narrative crafting and management of such scenarios are studied across canonical novels by Gide, Colette, Mauriac, and Duras, as well as by African Francophone writer Oyono and detective novelist Japrisot. As manipulated within narrative, acts of display position a viewer or reader from whom response (from veneration or desire to repugnance or horror) is solicited; but this study demonstrates that display can also work subversively, destabilising and displacing such a privileged spectator. As strategies of displacement, these scenarios ultimately neutralise and even occult the very subject they so energetically appear to solicit. Powered by gendered tensions, this dynamic of display as displacement works toward purposes of struggle, resistance or repression.

Stolen Limelight: Gender, Display and Displacement In Modern Fiction in French

The city has traditionally been configured as a fundamentally masculine space. This collection of essays seeks to question many of the idées reçues surrounding women’s ongoing association with the private, the domestic and the rural. Covering a selection of films, journals and novels from the French medieval period to the Franco-Algerian present, it challenges the traditionally gendered dichotomisation of the masculine public and feminine private upon which so much of French and European literature and culture is predicated. Is the urban flâneur a quintessentially male phenomenon, or can there exist a true flâneuse as active agent, expressing the confidence and pleasure of a woman moving freely in the urban environment? Women and the City in French Literature and Culture seeks to locate exactly where women are heading – both individually and collectively – in their relationships to the urban environment; by so doing, it nuances the conventional binaristic perception of women and the city in an endeavour to redirect future research in women’s studies towards more interesting and representative urban destinations.

Women and the City in French Literature and Culture: Reconfiguring the Feminine in the Urban Environment

Travel writing, migrant writing, exile writing, expatriate writing, and even the fictional travelling protagonists that emerge in literary works from around the globe, have historically tended to depict mobility as a masculine phenomenon. The presence of such genres in women’s writing, however, poses a rich and unique body of work. This volume examines the texts of Francophone women who have experienced or reflected upon the experience of transnational movement. Due to the particularity of their relationship to home, and the consequent impact of this on their experience of displacement, the study of women's mobility opens up new questions in our understanding of the movement from place to place, and in our broader understanding of colonial and postcolonial worlds. Addressing the proximities and overlaps that exist between the experiences of women exiles, migrants, expatriates and travellers, the collected essays in this book seek to challenge the usefulness, relevance or validity of such terms for conceptualising today’s complex patterns of transnational mobility and the gendered identities produced therein.

Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women's Writing

David A. Pettersen

Gangsters, aviators, hard-boiled detectives, gunslingers, jazz and images of the American metropolis were all an inextricable part of the cultural landscape of interwar France. While the French 1930s have long been understood as profoundly anti-American, this book shows how a young, up-and-coming generation of 1930s French writers and filmmakers approached American culture with admiration as well as criticism. For some, the imaginary America that circulated through Hollywood films, newspaper reports, radio programming and translated fiction represented the society of the future, while for others it embodied a dire threat to French identity. This book brings an innovative transatlantic perspective to 1930s French culture, focusing on several of the most famous figures from the 1930s – including Marcel Carné, Louis-Fernand Céline, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Julien Duvivier, André Malraux, Jean Renoir and Jean-Paul Sartre – to track the ways in which they sought to reinterpret the political and social dimensions of modernism for mass audiences via an imaginary America.

Americanism, Media and the Politics of Culture in 1930s France

In an era of commemoration, France's Colonial Legacies contributes to the debates taking place in France about the place of empire in the contemporary life of the nation, debates that have been underway since the 1990s and that now reach across public life and society with manifestations in the French parliament, media and universities. France's empire and the gradual process of its loss is one of the defining narratives of the contemporary nation, contributing to the construction of its image both on the international stage and at home. While certain intellectuals present the imperial period as an historical irrelevance that ended in the years following the Second World War, the contested legacies of France's colonies continue to influence the development of French society in the view of scholars of the postcolonial. This volume surveys the memorial practices and discourses that are played out in a range of arenas, drawing on the expertise of researchers working in the fields of politics, media, cultural studies, literature and film to offer a wide-ranging picture of remembrance in contemporary France.

France's Colonial Legacies: Memory, Identity and Narrative

Women's Writing in Twenty-First Century France is the first book-length publication on women-authored literature of this period, and comprises a collection of challenging critical essays that engage with the themes, trends and issues, and with the writers and their texts, of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Women's Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature

Ceri Morgan

In examining a number of francophone Montréal novels from 1960 to 2005, this interdisciplinary study considers the ways in which these connect with material landscapes to produce a city of neighbourhoods. In so doing, it reflects on how Montréal has been seen as both home and not home for francophone Quebecers. Morgan offers an overview of the fiction; examines micro and macro geographies of Montréal, and identifies some key literary trends. In so doing, it reflects on the importance of the imaginary in our experiencing and understanding of the urban.