The Becoming of the Body ─ Contemporary Women's Writing in French

Following a long tradition of objectification, 20th-century French feminism often sought to liberate the female body from the confines of patriarchal logos and to inscribe its rhythms in writing.

But how has the promotion of 'women's writing' in such thought and literature evolved in the years preceding and following the turn of the millennium?

What sorts of bodily questions and problems do contemporary female writers evoke?

How are traditional conceptions of the boundaries of the female body contested, exceeded or transformed?

And how do contemporary philosophical discourses correspond to the ways that literary authors conceptualise, and write, the female body?

Amaleena Damle is Research Fellow in French at Girton College, University of Cambridge. She is a specialist in 20th and 21st century French philosophy and literature, with a particular interest in identity, the body, gender and sexuality. She is the author of several articles on contemporary women's writing in French, and the co-editor, with Gill Rye, of Women's Writing in Twenty-First-Century France (2013), Experiment and Experience (2013), Aventures et experiences litteraires (2013, forthcoming) and, with Aurelie L'Hostis, The Beautiful and the Monstrous (2010).