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CONTENTS: Polly Galis, Maria Tomlinson/Antonia Wimbush: Introduction – Queering the Body – Brian Troth: Hookups: Social Networking and Digital Bodies in Twenty-First-Century France – Adina Stroia: Lesbian Selves: The Figure of the (Body) Double in Marie Nimier’s Works – Ray Balstad: Children Out of Line: Gender (Dis)Orientations and Paths of Queer Resistance in the Heterotopia – Rethinking Gendered Bodily Norms – Kathleen Rizy: Motherhood Reconceived: The Posthuman Future Is Female in «Mon mari le clone» by Marie Darrieussecq – Vanessa Lee: The Female Body in the Plays of French Caribbean Women Writers – Seth Compaoré: Male Bodily Poetics in André Téchiné Quand on a 17 ans (2016): Physical Violence and Teenage Passion – Hybrid and Dysfunctional Bodies – Cristina Onesta: Dysfunctional Bodies, Dysfunctional Gazes: Artistic Creation and Death in Manger l’autre by Ananda Devi and Le Génie d’Abou by Isabelle Boni-Claverie – Sara Bédard-Goulet: 14 or the Missing Arm: Ontological Instability of the French Contemporary Novel in Jean Echenoz’s Work – Kate Foster: The Cyborg’s Undecidable Body: A Game of «Who am I?» in Gaston Leroux’s La Poupée sanglante – Bodies in Flux – Loren K. Wolfe: Mediating Eve: Female Protagonists and the Contingent Body in Hervé Guibert’s Late Narratives – Jennifer Boum Make: Exploring Encounters in Passages by Emile Ollivier: The Role of Testimonial Responsibility to Othered Bodies – Kathryn Chaffee: Dance as Encounter in the Films of Claire Denis – Polly Galis, Maria Tomlinson/Antonia Wimbush: Conclusion. Queer(y)ing Bodily Norms in Francophone Culture questions how a wide selection of restrictive norms come to bear on the body, through a close analysis of a range of texts, media and genres originating from across the francophone world and spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Each essay troubles hegemonic, monolithic perceptions and portrayals of racial, class, gender, sexual and/or national identity, rethinking bodily norms as portrayed in literature, film, theatre and digital media specifically from a queer and querying perspective. The volume thus takes «queer(y)ing» as its guiding methodology, an approach to culture and society which examines, questions and challenges normativity in all of its guises. The term «queer(y)ing» retains the celebratory tone of the term «queer» but avoids appropriating the identity of the LGBTQ+ community, a group which remains marginalized to this day. The publication reveals that evaluating the bodily norms depicted in francophone culture through a queer and querying lens allows us to fragment often oppressive and restrictive norms, and ultimately transform them «In this timely and important collection, the editors bring together a series of reflections onthe body in contemporary French and Francophone cultures. Chapters consider a range ofpertinent topics, from the digital mediation of bodies and sexualities on social networkingplatforms, through considerations of current meanings of motherhood, to the perennialconcerns of bodily dysfunction, disease and death.» (Lisa Downing, Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality,University of Birmingham)«Emphasising the body as central to queer studies, this valuable collection of essays offers anattentiveness to specific cultural-historical, geographic and linguistic particularities that is oftenfound wanting in works of anglophone queer theory, thereby demonstrating the importanceof Modern Languages’ interdisciplinary, culturally specific approach to queer scholarship.» (Elliot Evans, author of The Body in French Queer Thought fromWittig to Preciado: Queer Permeability)
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