Editors' Latest Works

Beyond French Feminisms. Debates on Women, Politics and Culture in France. 1981-2001

Edited, with an introduction by Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin, Isabelle de Courtivron
New York, London: Palgrave/St. Martin Press, 2002

What's new in French feminism at the beginning of the 21st century. How did France, within a decade, change from one of the most backward European societies in terms of women's representation in the political sphere, into one of the most progressive in this area-at least in theory? What are French and Francophone women up to in the arts and literature? The essays in this volume, written by the most prominent personalities in the field, examine some of the new issues that have arisen in French society in the past twenty years. In general, these essays reflect the shift from the literary and psychoanalytic approaches that characterized French feminism twenty years ago, to the more social and political questions of today. Some of the topics include: the "parity" and the "PaCS" debates, the France-USA exchanges, the issue of "multiculturalism," the new historical approaches, and the most recent trends in literature and film by women.

Table of Contents

I. Editors' Introduction

II. Politics and Society
Sylviane Agacinski. The Turning Point of Feminism: Against the Effacement of Women
Pierre Bourdieu. Symbolic Violence
Eric Fassin. The Politics of PaCS in a Transatlantic Mirror: Same-Sex Unions and Sexual Difference in France
Christine Fauré. The History of Women after the Law on Parity
Geneviève Fraisse. Exclusive Democracy: A French Paradigm
Françoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhavar. The Headscarf and the Republic
Benoîte Groult. The Feminization of Professional Names: An Outrage against Masculinity
Jeanine Mossuz-Lavau. The Politics of Reproduction
Véronique Nahoum-Grappe. Sexualities on Parade
Manifesto of "Les Chiennes de garde"
Mireille Rosello. New Gendered Mosaics: Their Mothers and the Gauls

III. Arts and Literature
Odile Cazenave. Francophone Women Writers in France in the Nineties
Whitney Chadwick. Body as Subject: Four Contemporary Women Artists
Hélène Cixous. Unmasked!
Catherine Cusset. Marguerite's Nieces: Women's Novels at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
Marie Etienne. The Doorway of the World: Women in Contemporary French-Language Poetry
Anne Gillain. Profile of a Filmmaker: Catherine Breillat
Geneviève Sellier. French Women Making Films in the 1990s

IV. France - USA
Debate. Women: A French Singularity?

• Elisabeth Badinter. The "French Exception"
  
• Joan Scott. "Vive la diffèrence"
  
• Mona Ozouf. "Counting the Days"
  

Judith Feher-Gurewich. Lacan and American Feminism: Who Is the Analyst?
Jean-Philippe Mathy. The Symptom of "American-Style Feminism
Claire Goldberg Moses. Made in America: "French Feminism" in Academia

V. Bibliography

Cutting the Body: Representing Woman in Baudelaire's Poetry, Truffaut's Cinema, and Freud's Psychoanalysis

Eliane DalMolin, University of Connecticut
Michigan University Press, Oct. 2000

This book is about how poets, film-makers and psychoanalysts look upon the female body, how they examine it in detail as if dissecting it, at times relishing it, at others anguishing over its fragmentation, ultimately it is about how, by cutting woman's body, poets, film-makers, and psychoanalysts create and think.

More specifically, this book is about how Charles Baudelaire, François Truffaut, and Sigmund Freud, based on their inheritance of lyricism, shaped and perpetuated a cultural understanding of women that they continued to represent in "late romantic" images, despite their respective innovative talent and influence in bringing about decisive cultural moments: "Modernism," "New Wave" cinema, and psychoanalysis. The book explores the intriguing question of how, despite the novelty and advances of their art, woman's body stands "in pieces" in their work, at the crossroads of the old and the new, the lyric and the modern, thus positing the tension and ambivalence that characterizes the male subject on the eve of postmodern thinking.

Cutting the Body begins by examining how the concept of lyric expression is intimately and permanently linked to the representation of woman's body. In the Petrarchan tradition, the lyric subject, struck by the overwhelming apparition and subsequent disappearance of the ideal woman, dedicates his life and work to (re)membering, in fragments, her vanished body. Clear traces of this moment can be found in Baudelaire's poetry, Truffaut's cinema, and Freud's psychoanalysis in which woman's body materializes in verbal, visual and analytical terms as a dismembered figure, as it first did in lyrical poetry. In Baudelaire's poetry, the poetic subject is smitten by the beauty of the unknown passer-by whose eternally lost physical charms he can only recall in pieces. In Truffaut's cinema, the male characters often extend the pleasure of their astounding encounter with a sometimes fatally attractive "magic" woman by fearfully worshipping parts of her. In Freud's psychoanalysis, the male subject often faces the terrifying side of femininity in dreams such as "Irma's injection," thus expressing anxiety vis-a-vis the female body, a phobia later explained in theories of castration, decapitation, and fetishism. Finally, in sharp contrast to the devastating effect of the dividing cut applied to the beautiful woman, the book also explores the suturing effect of the "birth cut." It argues that, despite and beyond their rejection of the mother, Baudelaire, Truffaut, and Freud create maternal moments whereby separation becomes reparation and body cuts are ultimately formative rather than destructive.

This work's originality comes primarily from in its unique summoning of three distinct disciplines around the notion of the cut. It places the complex desire to cut the woman's body at the center of an investigation of male identity in Western culture through incisive discussions of poetry, cinema, and psychoanalysis. The terms of this inquiry will disclose an uncanny male disposition to femininity and motherhood, and its direct implication in productive acts of cutting. The crossdisciplinary nature of this book will attract a large readership: it will be of direct interest to literary scholars in and beyond French Studies, it will also appeal to film specialists, feminist theorists, and experts in psychoanalytical theories.

"Driss Chraïbi's A Place in the Sun: The King, the Detective, the Banker, and Casablanca"

in The Post-colonial Detective (edited by Ed Christian)
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001

Roger Célestin, University of Connecticut

Book description:

What happens to detective fiction when the detective is postcolonial, a marginalized native or settler in a country recovering from colonialism? This introduction to the peculiarities of the postcolonial detective and to postcolonial theory establishes a context in which to view more than a dozen notable detectives and authors from around the world. The essays present postcolonial detection as an exciting hybrid of western-influenced police methods and plot conventions with indigenous cultural insights and wisdom in exotic settings.