French Cultural Studies current issue

Frigidity, Gender and Power in French Cultural History: From Jean Fauconney to Marie Bonaparte

Moore, A. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:26:25 PDT

This paper interrogates the commonplace view of frigidity as a notion always founded upon the misogynist failure to understand female sexual specificity. As an historical explanation, this view fails to take into account the contextual parameters of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about female desire within which the notion of la femme frigide emerged and developed. This paper discusses the work of a range of French medical and psychoanalytic thinkers across the turn of the twentieth century and through the interwar period, showing how ‘frigidity’ was developed at this time by those who saw themselves precisely as contesting prevailing notions of normative feminine desire, or as defending the rights of women to maximum pleasure. But the inventors of frigidity were no feminist avengers either. Their demands for female pleasure assumed a delicate axis between the avoidance of excess, on the one hand, and the dangers of perversion that would result from any attempt to deny sexuality generally, on the other. Viewed within the context of early twentieth-century French gender anxieties, thinkers like Fauconney and Marie Bonaparte are ambivalent exemplars of the ‘management’ of sexuality referred to by Michel Foucault.

Au c{oelig}ur de notre corps: Recit realiste et imaginaire du corps dans le discours psycho-corporel francais

Grauby, F. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:26:25 PDT

Cet article se propose d’interroger le discours psycho-corporel dans les publications du bien-être (self-help) qui rencontrent aujourd’hui un vif succès, à travers l’analyse de l’ouvrage de Marie-Lise Labonté, Au cœur de notre corps. A la lumière des observations de Philippe Hamon sur le roman réaliste, nous avons tenté de montrer que sa structure, tout autant que sa présentation du corps et de la maladie, épouse un ordre rhétorique hérité du roman réaliste. Sans être un récit littéraire, ce récit de guérison quasi-miraculeuse partage des préoccupations voisines: nourri de langage reichien et de savoirs intuitifs sur le corps, le récit rejoint un principe organisateur emprunté au roman réaliste — la logique du récit classique, son enchaînement, sa dramatisation tiennent en échec le hasard. Le corps y apparaît transparent, déchiffrable, authentique. Un nouvel imaginaire corporel populaire naît de ces déchiffrements: formaté selon des lois rhétoriques précises, ce discours impose un corps idéalisé, fait rimer maladie avec échec et renvoie ultimement le patient à lui-même.

Troubling Memories: Words and Images of Absence in Camille Laurens, Marie Darrieussecq and Nadine Trintignant

Kilduff, H. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:26:25 PDT

Although mourning commonly inspires cathartic creativity, the desire to render presence exposes the fault-lines of any mode of expression. This paradoxical ‘presence of absence’ is what links the literary and filmic texts by Camille Laurens, Marie Darrieussecq and Nadine Trintignant that this article addresses. Each of these works give the photograph a privileged position: it is cited as a source of anxiety, a trace of the real alongside other ‘écriture de corps’. Alongside inter-textual and other intermedial references, these photographs are drawn upon when single words seem to falter. Their role can be elucidated with reference to the Derridean supplement, revealing the ‘absence’ that subsists in all attempts to remember.

La Cote d'Azur: The terre privilegie of Invalids and Artists, c. 1860--1900

Woloshyn, T. A. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:26:25 PDT

This interdisciplinary article explores aesthetic and medical conceptions of the Côte d’Azur during the nineteenth century, discussing texts and images by French writers, invalids, tourists, physicians and artists. Through words and images, medico-tourist guides perpetuated a myth of the Côte d’Azur as the privileged site of beauty and health, especially to its visiting invalids, who sought in the climate a miraculous natural cure. Poetic descriptions of the landscape’s naturally regenerative potential pervade these works, not only by physicians and tourist writers but by the invalids themselves experiencing a pleasurable recovery on the coast. This article argues that such descriptions were, consciously or not, couched in a medical rhetoric, where the landscape’s typical topographic elements were understood as both beautiful and healing. In exploring these diverse visual and literary texts, the article shows how art and medicine intertwined in common French perceptions and imaginations of this landscape, c. 1860—1900.

Chanson as Oral Poetry? Paul Zumthor and the Analysis of Performance

Cordier, A. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:26:25 PDT

Medievalist Paul Zumthor, in his study of oral poetry, has identified the specificities of oral texts and analysed their inherently social function. By applying Zumthor’s theories to the chanson genre, this article aims to question the traditional distinction between poetry and song by supporting instead the distinction between oral and written poetry, in order to highlight the importance of the oral and physical dimension of song. Through the analysis of the orality of chanson, this study investigates the nature of the connection established between an artist and an audience during a performance, and argues that this connection is not only an integral part of the song, in the same way that music and lyrics are, but also contains the social significance of chanson and its authors.

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Looseley, D., Mevel, P.-A. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:26:25 PDT