Francophone Women

"Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility underscores the writing of authors who foreground the female body and who write across geographical borders, as part of a global literary movement that has the French language as its common denominator. This edited collection exposes how female authors portray the tensions that exist between visibility and invisibility, public and private, presence and absence, and excess and restraint when it is linked to femininity and the female body." --Book Jacket.

The author of the bestselling French Women Don't Get Fat shares the secrets and strategies of aging with attitude, joy, and no surgery. With her signature blend of wit, no-nonsense advice, and storytelling flair, Mireille Guiliano returns with a delightful, encouraging take on beauty and aging for our times. For anyone who has ever spent the equivalent of a mortgage payment on anti-aging lotions or procedures, dressed inappropriate for their age, gained a little too much in the middle, or accidentally forgot how to flirt, here is a proactive way to stay looking and feeling great, without resorting to "the knife"-a French woman's most guarded beauty secrets revealed for the benefit of us all!

A gourmand's guide to the slim life shares the principles of French gastronomy, the art of enjoying all edibles in proportion, arguing that the secret of being thin and happy lies in the ability to appreciate and balance pleasures.

The city has traditionally been configured as a fundamentally masculine space. This collection of essays seeks to question many of the idées reçues surrounding women’s ongoing association with the private, the domestic and the rural. Covering a selection of films, journals and novels from the French medieval period to the Franco-Algerian present, it challenges the traditionally gendered dichotomisation of the masculine public and feminine private upon which so much of French and European literature and culture is predicated. Is the urban flâneur a quintessentially male phenomenon, or can there exist a true flâneuse as active agent, expressing the confidence and pleasure of a woman moving freely in the urban environment? Women and the City in French Literature and Culture seeks to locate exactly where women are heading – both individually and collectively – in their relationships to the urban environment; by so doing, it nuances the conventional binaristic perception of women and the city in an endeavour to redirect future research in women’s studies towards more interesting and representative urban destinations.

For the legions of fans who asked for seconds after devouring French Women Don’t Get Fat, a charming and practical guide to adding some joie to your vie and to your table, every day of the year. By letter, by email and in person, readers of Mireille Guiliano’s phenomenal bestseller French Women Don’t Get Fat have inundated her with requests for more advice. Her answer: this buoyant new book, brimming with tips and tricks for living with the utmost pleasure and style, without gaining weight. More than a theory or ideal, the French woman’s way is an all-encompassing program that can be practised anytime, anywhere. Here are four full seasons of strategies for shopping, cooking and moving throughout the year. Whether your aim is finding two scoopfuls of pleasure in one of crème brûlée, or entertaining beautifully when time is short and expectations are high, the answers are here. And here too are 100 new simple and appetizing recipes that feature French staples such as leeks and chocolate and many more unexpected treats besides, guaranteeing that boredom will never be a guest at your table. Woven through this year of living comme les françaises are more of Mireille’s delectable stories about living in Paris and New York and travelling just about everywhere else – in the voice that has already beguiled a million honorary French women. Lest anyone still wonder: here is a new compendium of reasons – both traditional and modern – why French women don’t get fat.

The secret history of the rebellious Frenchwomen who were exiled to colonial Louisiana and found power in the Mississippi Valley In 1719, a ship named La Mutine (the mutinous woman), sailed from the French port of Le Havre, bound for the Mississippi. It was loaded with urgently needed goods for the fledgling French colony, but its principal commodity was a new kind of export: women. Falsely accused of sex crimes, these women were prisoners, shackled in the ship’s hold. Of the 132 women who were sent this way, only 62 survived. But these women carved out a place for themselves in the colonies that would have been impossible in France, making advantageous marriages and accumulating property. Many were instrumental in the building of New Orleans and in settling Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, and Mississippi. Drawing on an impressive range of sources to restore the voices of these women to the historical record, Mutinous Women introduces us to the Gulf South’s Founding Mothers.

Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1848-2016 explores how black women in France itself, the French Caribbean, Gorée, Dakar, Rufisque, and Saint-Louis experienced and reacted to French colonialism and how gendered readings of colonization, decolonization, and social movements cast new light on the history of French colonization and of black France. In addition to delineating the powerful contributions of black French women in the struggle for equality, contributors also look at the experiences of African American women in Paris and in so doing integrate into colonial and postcolonial conversations the strategies black women have engaged in negotiating gender and race relations à la française. Drawing on research by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and countries, this collection offers a fresh, multidimensional perspective on race, class, and gender relations in France and its former colonies, exploring how black women have negotiated the boundaries of patriarchy and racism from their emancipation from slavery to the second decade of the twenty-first century.

This volume examines the ways in which multilingual women authors incorporate several languages into their life writing. It compares the work of six contemporary authors who write predominantly in French. It analyses the narrative strategies they develop to incorporate more than one language into their life writing: French and English, French and Creole, or French and German, for example. The book demonstrates how women writers transform languages to invent new linguistic formations and how they create new formulations of subjectivity within their self-narrative. It intervenes in current debates over global literature, national literatures and translingual and transnational writing, which constitute major areas of research in literary and cultural studies. It also contributes to debates in linguistics through its theoretical framework of translanguaging. It argues that multilingual authors create new paradigms for life writing and that they question our understanding of categories such as "French literature."