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Natural Mothers and the Changing “Character” of Englishness: A Pitiless Mother, Hic Mulier, and Macbeth

Trubowitz Rachel

in Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature

This chapter reads Macbeth in relationship to the querelle des femmes. It focuses specifically on two gender-debate pamphlets that characterize “the good woman” as a natural nurturer, in opposition ... More

This chapter reads Macbeth in relationship to the querelle des femmes. It focuses specifically on two gender-debate pamphlets that characterize “the good woman” as a natural nurturer, in opposition to aristocratic customs, such as wet-nursing. For the pamphlet writers, nature conforms to empirically observable laws; the naturalness of maternal nurture is the key to normative English identity. By contrast, in Macbeth, nature is a mysterious realm, beyond the reach of science and reason, associated with the magic of English kingship. Lady Macbeth's contempt for maternal nurture and her disdain for the mysterious nature of dynastic sovereignty go hand-in-hand. Macduff briefly challenges the mystical–monarchical relations between nature and nurture when he insists, in opposition to Malcolm, that his overwhelming grief for his murdered wife and children is manly. Macduff's new, affective insights into nature and gender overlap with the gender debate's anti-customary associations between maternal nurture and national identity.Less

Delacroix

J. A. Hiddleston

in Baudelaire and the Art of Memory

Baudelaire thought that, of all contemporary artists, Delacroix alone excelled in the painting of religious subjects, and that he alone ‘sait faire de la religion’. This chapter focuses on a ... More

Baudelaire thought that, of all contemporary artists, Delacroix alone excelled in the painting of religious subjects, and that he alone ‘sait faire de la religion’. This chapter focuses on a relatively small number of key paintings La Madeleine dans le dé sert, La Mort de Sardanapale, La Lutte de Jacob avec l'ange, Pietà, Les Femmes d'Alger, and Ovide chez les Scythes.Less

Importing Ficino: Gender Balance in Champier

Todd W. Reeser

in Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance

Symphorien Champier’s The Ship of Virtuous Ladies is generally considered one of the earliest contributions to the pro-woman side of the French Renaissance version of the querelle des femmes, the ... More

Symphorien Champier’s The Ship of Virtuous Ladies is generally considered one of the earliest contributions to the pro-woman side of the French Renaissance version of the querelle des femmes, the cultural debate over the nature and status of women. Heavily influenced by the work of Ficino, Book 4 helps popularize Ficinian Neoplatonism in France, setting the stage for later representations of male-female love. Yet, unexpectedly, love and desire between men plays a major role in Book 4. While this section of the text purports to teach men and women how to love each other virtuously, Champier also includes a lengthy story illustrating “the power of love of one man for another man.” With its love triangles and its gender complexities, the adaptation from Boccaccio’s Decameron rejects the possibility of Ficinian male-male eroticism as it creates a “balance” model of gender by which male-male and male-female love coexist. Disease is caused by a lack of gender balance whose symptoms require a realignment of gendered desire. This curative realignment for Champier, trained as a doctor and a philosopher, pertains especially to his vision of a balanced France, as distinguished from Italy.Less

Fractured Men: Feminism and Neoplatonism in Mid-Sixteenth-Century France

Todd W. Reeser

in Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance

This chapter considers how feminism and male-male love can operate in tension. Same-sex male sexuality was sometimes perceived as misogynistic in pro-woman arguments in the early-modern debate over ... More

This chapter considers how feminism and male-male love can operate in tension. Same-sex male sexuality was sometimes perceived as misogynistic in pro-woman arguments in the early-modern debate over the nature and status of women. As a key case study in this cultural tension, the center of this chapter is a reading of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, a feminist collection of tales heavily inflected with Neoplatonism. To prepare for a reading of this text, the mid-century French context of the reception of Plato is discussed. A close-reading of the Heptameron reveals that intimacy between men has to be fractured in order to create a version of heterosexuality that can subsequently lead to pro-woman ends. In a number of cases, male-male intimacy is transformed into what might be termed heterosexuality. The text, however, sends a specific message about the nature of male-male love, as the narrative corresponds to techniques of rewriting Plato seen in contemporaneous French translations of Plato, especially the Symposium version by Louis Le Roy. Male-male love, then, is evoked but then visibly written out in Marguerite de Navarre in ways that the French translations use to transform the eroticism in Plato’s text.Less

Gender, Migration, and Empire

Marie-Paule Ha

in French Women and the Empire: The Case of Indochina

This chapter traces the evolution of the French female emigration movement launched at the turn of the century. According to its supporters, sending women overseas could solve myriad social and ... More

This chapter traces the evolution of the French female emigration movement launched at the turn of the century. According to its supporters, sending women overseas could solve myriad social and political ills plaguing both the metropole and the colonies: their presence would lead to the establishment of French families in the empire, thereby ensuring the colons’ permanent settlement; it would also bring relief to the nation’s depopulation crisis, and an “outlet” to the “redundant” metropolitan single women who could make good marriage partners to French settlers, thus ending the problem of interracial concubinage. The second part of the chapter surveys two separate initiatives to jump start the female emigration movement: the Société française d’émigration des femmes, created by the Union coloniale to recruit female emigrants; and the Oeuvre coloniale des femmes françaises whose mission was to provide assistance to French women heading to the empire.Less

Prologue: Questions and Their Predecessors

Holly Case

in The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond

This prologue provides an overview of the history of the age of questions, and more specifically how “the x question” emerged and proliferated beginning in the 1830s. It considers when and why people ... More

This prologue provides an overview of the history of the age of questions, and more specifically how “the x question” emerged and proliferated beginning in the 1830s. It considers when and why people started thinking in terms of “the x question,” what the phrase meant, and whether there was such a thing as an age of questions. It examines the role played by the scholastic question, or quaestio disputata, in the age of questions; how the so-called querelle des femmes that was formulated in France in the sixteenth century morphed into the question des femmes, or woman question; catechisms as likely ancestors of questions; and forerunners of later questions, including the Palladium, a publication that opened a venue in the public sphere similar to the one created by the London debating societies. Finally, it explores how official venues lent their forms to the “age of questions”.Less

Our Editorial Policy Is a Poethics: September 1992

Antoinette Fouque and Jean-Joseph Goux

Sylvina Boissonnas (ed.)

in There Are Two Sexes: Essays in Feminology

This chapter explains the editorial policy of the publishing house Des femmes, owned by the Mouvement de Lib ération des Femmes (MLF), or Women's Liberation Movement. There is no difference between ... More

This chapter explains the editorial policy of the publishing house Des femmes, owned by the Mouvement de Lib ération des Femmes (MLF), or Women's Liberation Movement. There is no difference between the translation policy of Des femmes and an editorial project that was itself originally part of the MLF strategy, organized around Psychanalyse et Politique, and is now part of the strategy of the Women's Alliance for Democracy. Or, rather, the only difference is that the field covered by Des femmes's translation policy is more specific, while that of the movement is broader. Des femmes came into existence in 1973 based on the notion that, freed from their age-old servitudes, women would become the translators of the real, messengers of the impossible, and poets. The chapter describes gestation, or the capacity to think, welcome, and be with the other, as the paradigm of the linguistic and fleshly hospitality known as poetry, thought, translation, and publishing.Less

The Police and the Demimonde

Nina Kushner

in Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris

This chapter examines Jean-Baptiste Meusnier's investigation of elite prostitution in eighteenth-century Paris. In his ten-year career with a police unit, the Département des femmes galantes, he had ... More

This chapter examines Jean-Baptiste Meusnier's investigation of elite prostitution in eighteenth-century Paris. In his ten-year career with a police unit, the Département des femmes galantes, he had observed some 550 women. He was succeeded by his assistant, Inspector Louis Marais, who kept track of an equal number of women. By 1764, Marais combined these Notes with submissions of Anecdotes Galantes, reporting the extramarital affairs of men and women in elite society. Marais and Meusnier's activities show that police attention to kept women was essential to understanding how the demimonde operated. As such, current knowledge about the demimonde came from the police reports.Less

Icon of fashion

Felicity Chaplin

in La Parisienne in Cinema: Between Art and Life

Fashion is ubiquitous in the depiction of la Parisienne and demonstrates perhaps better than any other motif the variations within the type. These variations are reflected in the eclectic array of ... More

Fashion is ubiquitous in the depiction of la Parisienne and demonstrates perhaps better than any other motif the variations within the type. These variations are reflected in the eclectic array of film genres in which a fashionable Parisienne appears. The association of la Parisienne with fashion can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when the image of the chic Parisienne was first exported, both throughout France and abroad, as an ambassador for French luxury goods and style. The relationship between la Parisienne and fashion is perpetuated in cinema primarily through the way the type is costumed, but also includes extra-cinematic considerations such as the actress/couturier relationship and the way a certain look, designed or self-styled, was achieved and marketed. Costume forms an integral part of the mise en scène in Parisienne films and has three primary functions: it denotes the elegance of the Parisienne, aids in periodising a film, and provides meaning beyond denotation by referencing a pre-existing iconography. The films examined in this chapter are: Jules Dassin’s Reunion in France, Stanley Donen’s Funny Face(1956), Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi, (1958), Roman Polanski’s Frantic (1988), François Ozon’s 8 femmes (2001) and Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle(1960).Less

Our Movement Is Irreversible: March 8, 1989

Antoinette Fouque and Jean-Joseph Goux

Sylvina Boissonnas (ed.)

in There Are Two Sexes: Essays in Feminology

This chapter reflects on how women are continuing to fight for their rights and asserts that the Women's Movement is irreversible. It considers two events that were celebrated in the Sorbonne on ... More

This chapter reflects on how women are continuing to fight for their rights and asserts that the Women's Movement is irreversible. It considers two events that were celebrated in the Sorbonne on March 8, 1989: International Women's Day and the bicentennial of the French Revolution and of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It discusses how the Women's Movement has not only reinvigorated existing institutions—for example, Planning Familial (Planned parenthood), which was involved well before 1968 in the battle over contraception—but has also nourished and influenced contemporary thought, from psychoanalysis to literature by way of philosophy. In addition, it has given rise to other movements. Political parties and the state have legitimized the movement over the last fifteen years by creating and recreating an institutional feminism. The chapter also looks at the Mouvement de Lib ération des Femmes (MLF) and how women around the world have been mobilizing on the front lines of the battle for democracy.Less

Women in Movements—Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: April 1990

Antoinette Fouque and Jean-Joseph Goux

Sylvina Boissonnas (ed.)

in There Are Two Sexes: Essays in Feminology

This chapter presents an interview with Antoinette Fouque about the status of women and the Women's Movement in the past, present, and future. Fouque talks about the Women's Liberation Movement, the ... More

This chapter presents an interview with Antoinette Fouque about the status of women and the Women's Movement in the past, present, and future. Fouque talks about the Women's Liberation Movement, the Mouvement de Lib ération des Femmes (MLF), which was created in the wake of May 1968. She argues that May 1968 was first and foremost an effervescence, an oral explosion, a cry, and that the Women's Movement may have been started by intellectuals—Monique Wittig, Josiane Chanel, and herself—but the cry came first, and the body along with it. Fouque also reflects on what she was doing on the eve of 1968, how she met Jacques Lacan, whether she was a feminist before 1968, whether she was aware of what was going on in American feminism when May 1968 happened, and whether the name Psychanalyse et Politique is elitist. She also cites her meeting with Simone de Beauvoir, what lay behind the rift over the word feminist, and where she situates the Women's Movement within the events of May 1968.Less

From Liberation to Democratization: July 1, 1992

Antoinette Fouque and Jean-Joseph Goux

Sylvina Boissonnas (ed.)

in There Are Two Sexes: Essays in Feminology

The chapter reflects on how the women's liberation movement has opened the way to democratization. The chapter's author begins by citing the University of Aix-Marseille where she received her initial ... More

The chapter reflects on how the women's liberation movement has opened the way to democratization. The chapter's author begins by citing the University of Aix-Marseille where she received her initial (literary) education, and which was chosen by the Mouvement de Lib ération des Femmes (MLF) as the site for its first public demonstration, or first outing, in the spring of 1970. She then talks about her doctorat d' État, which brought her into contact with psychoanalytic thought and with its masters and its instruments, including Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and Sándor Ferenczi. She also discusses how the transition from psychoanalysis of the subject to psychoanalysis of the body, or “natural psychoanalysis,” resulted in a democratization of symbolic power. Finally, the chapter argues that the law, by foreclosing women's bodies as the space of production of living beings, maintains and perpetuates the erasure and nonexistence of the matricial, overlooking its anteriority.Less

Introduction

Ann M. Little

in The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright

This introductory chapter claims that “captivity” is one of the overarching themes in the lives of women in early North America. None of them was free in the sense that native women were embedded in ... More

This introductory chapter claims that “captivity” is one of the overarching themes in the lives of women in early North America. None of them was free in the sense that native women were embedded in kin networks that imposed reciprocal obligations and benefits. Anglo-American women lived most of their lives as femmes couvertes, without political or economic liberty as they lived and worked under the legal authority of fathers and husbands. The life of Esther Wheelwright, who spent most of her time inside the cloister as a nun, provides an excellent example of an account showing the relationship between captivity and liberty. She had crossed many borders and had experienced challenges while ingratiating herself with different captors and new families.Less

What Is a Woman?: 2008

Antoinette Fouque and Jean-Joseph Goux

Sylvina Boissonnas (ed.)

in There Are Two Sexes: Essays in Feminology

This chapter explains how the Mouvement de Lib ération des Femmes (MLF), or Women's Liberation Movement, came into existence. In offering testimony about the history of the MLF, the author of this ... More

This chapter explains how the Mouvement de Lib ération des Femmes (MLF), or Women's Liberation Movement, came into existence. In offering testimony about the history of the MLF, the author of this chapter highlights three dates that marked her path, three births: her own (1936), that of her daughter Vincente (1964), and that of the MLF (1968). Until her pregnancy, the author says she had lived on the myth of sexual difference, but without difference between the sexes. She describes how her pregnancy allowed her to deconstruct herself as identical and to reconstruct herself as a woman with competencies and capacities, to give her access to something real that had had no place. Within the nascent MLF, she created a research group called Psychanalyse et Politique. Politics, to highlight the fact that in psychoanalysis there is a form of power that must also be questioned. The MLF adopted the slogan “our bodies belong to us” to indicate two contrasting trends relating to abortion and procreation.Less

Gravida: 1980

Antoinette Fouque and Jean-Joseph Goux

Sylvina Boissonnas (ed.)

in There Are Two Sexes: Essays in Feminology

In the interview presented here, Antoinette Fouque talks about the subject of feminism. Fouque first provides an overview of the beginnings of the Mouvement de Lib ération des Femmes (MLF) in France ... More

In the interview presented here, Antoinette Fouque talks about the subject of feminism. Fouque first provides an overview of the beginnings of the Mouvement de Lib ération des Femmes (MLF) in France and of the Psychanalyse et Politique collective. She then explains her use of psychoanalysis to posit the contradiction and antagonism between the sexes, and whether the importance of Carl Jung in the United States sheds some light on the feminists' attitude toward Sigmund Freud. She also reiterates her belief that feminism is historically the last metaphor of patriarchy, and that feminism is a fixation of the woman at the phallic phase. Finally, she discusses the MLF's campaign against rape, how a woman can get beyond the phallic stage without simply rejecting it, the claim made by some women that the clitoris is the source of women's jouissance, the problem of symbolizing the vagina and the uterus, how the uterus can win the right to exist politically, and the need to challenge the crushing of the pregenital stages by the primacy of the phallus.Less

Gender, Sexuality, and Queer Desires

Evelyn Blackwood

in Falling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia

This book explores the discourses that circulate in the lives of Indonesian lesbians “tomboi” (derived from the English word “tomboy”), their practices, their social relations with kin and community, ... More

This book explores the discourses that circulate in the lives of Indonesian lesbians “tomboi” (derived from the English word “tomboy”), their practices, their social relations with kin and community, and their linguistic strategies. Drawing on interviews with tombois who live primarily in the regional metropolis of Padang on the coast of West Sumatra, the book seeks to contextualize the rich and complex subjectivities they express. The respondents prefer to use gender-marked terms like “tomboi” for the masculine partners and “girlfriend” or “femme” for the feminine partners. This book examines the ways Indonesian lesbians claim, contest, rework, and blur the terms by which they define themselves. It also considers the processes and the moments through which tombois and their girlfriends take up particular subject positions in childhood and adulthood. Finally, it discusses the ways that nationally and globally circulating queer discourses are received and reinterpreted by both tombois and femmes.Less

Desire and Difference

Evelyn Blackwood

in Falling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia

This chapter explores how tombois and femmes come to understand their sexual desires by focusing on their emerging sexuality during their youth and their relationships in the lesbian world. It ... More

This chapter explores how tombois and femmes come to understand their sexual desires by focusing on their emerging sexuality during their youth and their relationships in the lesbian world. It suggests that tombois' sexual desires come to align with their feelings of being boys and their understanding of what masculinity entails. It shows that tombois view their sexual privileges differently than their girlfriends, a perception that is consistent with the ideology of sexual difference and underscores tombois' masculinity. At the same time tombois and girlfriends' sexual relationships are fraught with tensions and contradictions because of their tenuous connections to normative sex/gender. This chapter considers how femmes deal with the tensions between heteronormative categories of sex/gender, in which bodies and genders must be the same, and their perceptions of their partners. It also discusses the efforts of tombois and their girlfriends to maintain their relationships, whether by physically living together, postponing marriage, or, in the case of girlfriends, marrying in order to return to their partners.Less

Embodying the nation

Natalya Vince

in Our fighting sisters: Nation, memory and gender in Algeria, 1954-2012

This chapter explores how the collective identity of the newly-independent nation was (re)imagined through women under Presidents Ahmed Ben Bella (1962-65) and Houari Boumediene (1965-78), though ... More

This chapter explores how the collective identity of the newly-independent nation was (re)imagined through women under Presidents Ahmed Ben Bella (1962-65) and Houari Boumediene (1965-78), though examining official speeches, nationality law, discourses about marriage and naming, the creation of the Union Nationale des Femmes Algériennes (National Union of Algerian Women, UNFA) and the selection of women to acts as ‘ambassadors’ for Algeria on the world stage. Challenging familiar visions of 1960s and 1970s Algeria as locked in a struggle between Arabo-Islamic ‘tradition’ and Socialist ‘modernity’, the chapter argues that a puritanical revolutionary fervour could fuse religious and cultural conservatism with the desire to build a socialist state, thus ‘making safe’ women’s entry into the public sphere. As a counterpoint to the obsession with women in official speeches, this chapter concludes with an exploration of how interviewees resisted ‘embodying the nation’ by insisting that they were gender-neutral citizens.Less