«Plaisirs de femmes»

Maggie Allison, Elliot Evans
and Carrie Tarr (eds)

Plaisirs de femmes

Women, Pleasure and Transgression
in French Literature and Culture

PETER LANG

Oxford · Bern · Berlin · Bruxelles · New York · Wien

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Cover image: Alexej von Jawlensky, Medusa (1923). Oil on board. In the public domain.

Cover design: Peter Lang Ltd.

ISSN 1422-9005

ISBN 978-1-78874-383-9 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78874-384-6 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-78874-385-3 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78874-386-0 (mobi)

© Peter Lang AG 2019

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Maggie Allison, Elliot Evans and Carrie Tarr have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this Work.

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About the author

MAGGIE ALLISON is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Modern French Studies at the University of Bradford. Her research and publishing cover gender, media, sexual harassment legislation and the role and televisual representation of women in politics and broadcasting. She has co-edited a number of volumes drawn from the Women in French (UK) biennial conferences.

ELLIOT EVANS is Lecturer in Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham, researching feminist, queer and transgender theories. Publications include ‘“Wittig and Davis, Woolf and Solanas (...) simmer within me”: Reading Feminist Archives in the Queer Writing of Paul B. Preciado’ for Paragraph (2018) and Queer Permeability: The Body in French Queer Thought from Wittig to Preciado (2019).

CARRIE TARR, Emerita Professor of Film at Kingston University, has published extensively on ethnicity, gender and sexuality in French and Francophone cinema. Publications include Cinema and the Second Sex: Women’s Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s (with B. Rollet, 2001), Reframing Difference: Beur and Banlieue Filmmaking in France (2005) and a guest edited issue of Studies in French Cinema on ‘Women’s Film-making in France 2000–2010’ (2012).

About the book

Feminist approaches to questions of women, pleasure and transgression have generally been premised on the assumption that women’s pleasures are typically constrained – if not ignored, marginalized or forbidden – in patriarchal cultures. The naming, foregrounding and pursuit of women’s pleasures can therefore be deemed potentially transgressive and linked to women’s emancipation in other realms. The essays in this volume draw on a range of materials, from travel writing and the novel to film and stand-up comedy, addressing the specificity of French and Francophone approaches to women, pleasure and transgression across a range of historical contexts.

The volume is divided into three sections: intellectual and creative pleasures; normative pleasures, that is, pleasures conforming to women’s conventionally expected roles and status as well as to accepted views regarding race, national identity and sexuality; and perverse pleasures, that is, pleasures transgressive in their tendency to reject authority and norms, and often controversial in their ‘excessive’ appetite for violence, sex, alcohol or food. In each case, questions are raised about how we approach such pleasures as feminist researchers, motivated in part by a desire to counter the notion of feminism and feminist research as something ‘dour’ or joyless.

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Maggie Allison, Elliot Evans and Carrie Tarr

Introduction

part i Intellectual and Creative Pleasures

Chantal Chawaf

1 Écrivaine récalcitrante: entretien avec Maggie Allison

Kate Bonin 

2 Growing up Camille: Gusto and Disgust in Mireille Best’s Camille en octobre (1988)

Rebecca J. Deroo

3 Pleasure, Pain and Subversion in Agnès Varda’s L’Opéra Mouffe [Diary of a Pregnant Woman] (1958)

Nelly Quemener

4 Une femme non respectable: de l’humour de Blanche Gardin aux ressorts de sa célébration

James Illingworth

5 Joséphine Bowes (1825–1874), Shopaholic or Patroness of the Arts? ←v | vi→

part ii Normative Pleasures

Gabrielle Parker

6 Women and Pleasure in the Work of Madeleine Bourdouxhe

Isha Pearce

7 ‘Le Plaisir tout particulier’: The Troubling Pleasures of Leisure and Labour in Marie NDiaye’s En famille (1990) and Ladivine (2013)

Elliot Evans

8 Liberté sexuelle: Pleasure and Identity in Catherine Millet’s La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. (2001)

Maria Tomlinson

9 Subverting Patriarchal Norms(?): Women, Pleasure and the Menopause in Michèle Sarde’s Constance et la cinquantaine (2003)

Diana Holmes

10 Plaisir de lire: Women Readers and the Popular Bestsellers of Guillaume Musso

part iii Perverse Pleasures

Dúnlaith Bird

11 Filles de joie, filles sans voix: Representing the Vagabonde in French Legislation and Literature←vi | vii→

Melanie Hawthorne

12 Renée Vivien, frondeuse: A Woman Taking Pleasure in Behaving Badly

Shirley Jordan

13 Eating Between Pleasure and Discontent in Marie NDiaye’s ‘La Gourmandise’ (1996)

Carrie Tarr

14 Perverse Pleasures: Women’s Takes on ‘Extreme’ French Cinema

Siobhán McIlvanney

15 In Celebration of Celibacy: Sophie Fontanel’s L’Envie (2011)

Notes on Contributors