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

Abstract

Following a long tradition of objectification, twentieth-century French feminism has 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 conceptualize, and write, the female body? This book addresses such questions by exploring the intersections between a range of contemporary texts, including the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, recent feminist and queer thought, and contemporary writers Amélie Nothomb, Ananda Devi, Marie Darrieussecq and Nina Bouraoui. Revealing an emphasis on the becoming of the body in recent culture, it illuminates the implications of such a concept for a feminist politics, for women’s writing and for the cultural signification of contemporary female corporeality.