Tuesday 12 November, 5.15-6.30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Nicola Pearson (University of Bristol) – Breaking Taboos: Embodying Self and (M)other in Fawzia Zouari’s Le Corps de ma mère

This paper explores the concept of relational subjectivity and its fictionalisation in Fawzia Zouari’s Le Corps de ma mère (2016). Written at the height of the Tunisian Revolution in 2010-2012, the text explores the author’s quest to discover the life story of her dying mother. Although we may be seduced by the title into thinking that this is a biographical story about Zouari’s mother, the narrative says a lot more about the author’s own thoughts, emotions and lived experience. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of relational subjectivity (2004), I discuss the extent to which Zouari’s sense of self becomes undone by the idea of her recently deceased mother and the degree to which grief might trouble the boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘mother’ in the narrative.

At times, Zouari adopts a strategically stable and authoritative narrative persona in order to contest and affirm her difference from her mother’s patriarchal values. Alternatively, her narrative identity dissolves, merges and enmeshes with the abstract concepts of her mother and the maternal body. I argue that Zouari’s ambiguous fluctuation between essentialism and fragmentation, in her presentation of her narrative self, constitutes an alternative style of writing that transcends dominant paradigms traditionally associated with the genre of feminist life-writing, as well as existing scholarship on the author’s earlier works of fiction. Finally, Zouari’s embrace of the French language as her langue utérine, a way back to her mother through writing, signals new directions for the genre of Tunisian women’s life-writing in French.

Blanche Plaquvent (University of Bristol) – The Sexual Revolution against Orthodox Communism: Radical Sexual Politics and the Cold War in France, 1950-1968

In the post-war decades in France, intellectuals and activists rediscovered the idea of sexual revolution, which had emerged at the beginning of the century: they argued that the revolution was not only to be pursued in the economic sphere, but also was to impact and transform people’s intimate lives. In the fifties, defending the idea of sexual revolution became a way to oppose political parties on the far left which neglected sexual and intimate issues which they considered bourgeois issues. When they started to write about sexuality and discuss sexuality collectively, activists sought to oppose this orthodox communism and invent heterodox approaches to Marxism. Moreover, in defending the sexual revolution, they were opposing both the puritanical communism and the American liberalism where sex was commodified, in advertisement for instance. They envisioned a liberating use of sexuality that would pave the way for a revolutionary society. In the context of the Cold War, fighting for the sexual revolution therefore constituted a resistance to these international dynamics