Table Of ContentFrom Menstruation to the Menopause
The Female Fertility Cycle
in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 77
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures
Series Editor
CHARLES FORSDICK
University of Liverpool
Editorial Board
TOM CONLEY JACQUELINE DUTTON LYNN A. HIGGINS
Harvard University University of Melbourne Dartmouth College
MIREILLE ROSELLO DEREK SCHILLING
University of Amsterdam Johns Hopkins University
This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contem-
porary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical
practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural
and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All
manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression
are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes
in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary
culture.
Recent titles in the series:
64 Naïma Hachad, Revisionary Narratives: 70 Erin Twohig, Contesting the Classroom:
Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biographical Reimagining Education in Moroccan
and Testimonial Acts and Algerian Literatures
65 Emma Wilson, The Reclining Nude: 71 Keith Reader, The Marais: The Story
Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, and of a Quartier
Nan Goldin
72 Jane Hiddleston and Khalid Lyamlahy,
66 Margaret Atack, Alison S. Fell, Diana Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism,
Holmes, Imogen Long, Making Waves: Transnationalism and Culture in the
French Feminisms and their Legacies Maghreb and Beyond
1975–2015
73 Lia Brozgal, Absent the Archive:
67 Ruth Cruickshank, Leftovers: Eating, Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris,
Drinking and Re-thinking with Case 17 October 1961
Studies from Post-war French Fiction
74 Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, Past Imperfect:
68 Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick, Lydie Time and African Decolonization,
Moudileno, Postcolonial Realms of 1945–1960
Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern
75 Edward J. Hughes, Egalitarian
France
Strangeness: On Class Disturbance
69 Patrick Crowley and Shirley Jordan, and Levelling in Modern and
What Forms Can Do: The Work of Contemporary French Narrative
Form in 20th and 21st-century French
Literature and Thought
MARIA KATHRYN TOMLINSON
From Menstruation
to the Menopause
The Female Fertility Cycle in
Contemporary Women’s Writing
in French
From Menstruation to the Menopause
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 2021 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2021 Maria Kathryn Tomlinson
The right of Maria Kathryn Tomlinson to be identified as the author of
this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British Library CIP record is available
print ISBN 978-1-80034-846-2
epdf ISBN 978-1-80034-553-9
Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1. Problematising a ‘universal’ female bodily experience: The
second-wave feminists and their critics 19
2. Violence, trauma, and medicalisation: The female fertility
cycle in women’s writing from France 51
3. Islam, politics, and education: Framing the female fertility
cycle through an Algerian perspective 95
4. Multiculturalism and the legacy of colonialism: The
female fertility cycle in Mauritian women’s writing 141
Conclusion 181
Bibliography 197
Index 215
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to say an enormous thank you to my
mum and dad who supported me across the entirety of my PhD. I could
not have completed my thesis, and therefore this resulting monograph,
without your unwavering support. Thank you from the bottom of
my heart. An extra thanks is owed to my dad for his many hours of
proofreading my work.
I owe a debt of gratitude to my supervisors Julia Waters and Siobhan
Shilton for their dedication and reassurance. I wish to thank my
colleagues at Reading, Sheffield, and Bristol who have supported me
in my professional development. I would particularly like to extend my
thanks to Shirley Jordan, Susan Harrow, Marjorie Gehrhardt, Jared
Ahmad, Jackie Harrison, and Stef Pukallus.
Of course, my PhD would not have been possible without the
funding awarded to me by the South West and Wales Doctoral Training
Partnership of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Thank you
for your support of my project. I would also like to extend my thanks to
the Leverhulme Trust for awarding me an early career fellowship which
is allowing me to further my line of enquiry into menstrual experience.
Thanks also to Ewa Szypula for the beautiful drawing on the front cover
of this book. I would also like to thank Chloe Johnson at Liverpool
University Press for her guidance in publishing this monograph. Thanks
also to Peter Lang and Esprit Créateur for allowing me to reproduce
previously published material in this book.1
1 See Maria Tomlinson (2019) ‘Subverting Patriarchal Norms(?): The Pleasures
of Menopausal Women in Michèle Sarde’s Constance et la cinquantaine’ in
Maggie Allison, Elliot Evans and Carrie Tarr (eds), Plaisirs de femmes: Women’s
Pleasures and Their Discontents in French Literature and Culture, Oxford: Peter
Lang, 139–52. Research first appeared as the 2018 article ‘“On dirait que c’est
viii From Menstruation to the Menopause
Finally, I would like to thank my friends who have kept up my spirits
for all of these years. You are too many to name, but I would like to give
a special mention to some of my dearest friends: Emma (Fig.1), Nikki,
Zena, Emma (Poppet), Charlotte, Harriet, Hannah, Annabel, John,
and Kulvinder. Thanks also goes to my delightful FISHJAMZ friend
group. I would especially like to extend my thanks to my academic
best friends Antonia and Polly. Our Whatsapp conversations during
our organisation of the conference ‘Imagining the Body in France and
the Francophone World’ – and our various resulting publications and
further projects – have given me much needed motivation, both during
the PhD and writing this monograph. Last but not least, a special thanks
to my wonderful partner, Russell, who enjoyed learning about feminism
whilst proofreading this monograph.
I dedicate this book to my dad.
honteux de devenir une femme”: Narratives of a Girl’s First Menses in Maïssa Bey’s
Bleu blanc vert and Leïla Marouane’s La Jeune Fille et la mère’, L’Esprit Créateur
58.2, 112–25. © 2018 L’Esprit Créateur.
Introduction
Introduction
From Menstruation to the Menopause celebrates the richness and
diversity of contemporary women’s writing in French by focusing on
works of fiction from three different francophone contexts: Algeria,
Mauritius, and France.1 It is the first book to provide an in-depth
exploration of the female fertility cycle in contemporary women’s writing
in French. The female body has long remained a site of contention and
conflict throughout the world. For centuries, women have navigated
societal perceptions which stigmatise, marginalise, and undermine
female bodily experience. Since the twentieth century in particular,
women writers and activists have sought to challenge these harmful
ideas through novels, essays, protests, artwork, and, more recently,
on social media. In France, a feminist deconstruction and rejection of
patriarchal discourses about the female fertility cycle can be traced back
to the pioneering work of the second-wave feminists in the 1970s. This
criticism and defiance of patriarchal norms and beliefs is very much still
alive in contemporary women’s writing today.2
So far, in scholarship which examines contemporary women’s writing
in French, the female fertility cycle is usually only a secondary concern
1 In the context of this book, ‘France’ refers to the territory of France in
Europe as opposed to overseas territories or former colonial territories. The term
‘metropolitan France’ is to be avoided for its neo-colonialist implications. For
further discussion on this topic see Bill Marshall’s The French Atlantic: Travels in
Culture and History (2009). Throughout this book the word ‘francophone’, always
with a small ‘f’, will be employed to refer to all literature in the French language,
including that of mainland France. This term is therefore being used in a way
that Patrick Corcoran defines as an uncomplicated ‘linguistic term […] generally
understood as a mere synonym for “French speaking”’ (2007, 6).
2 Throughout this book, the phrase ‘contemporary women’s writing’ refers to
novels which have been published since 1990.
2 From Menstruation to the Menopause
in studies which focus on other themes. For example, a rare example
of a scholar who investigates the depiction of menstruation in Algerian
women’s writing is Katherine N. Harrington. In her study of nomadism
in Nina Bouraoui’s oeuvre (2013), Harrington briefly examines a scene
in La Voyeuse interdite. In this scene, the protagonist is beaten by
her father because he notices that her sheets are stained with her
menstrual blood. Nonetheless, Harrington selects this episode in order
to support her argument that the protagonist is positioned by the text
as an outsider, rather than her analysing how the novel represents her
menstrual experience. The menopause has been almost completely
neglected by scholars in the field of French literature. Thus, this book
provides a unique insight into how the menopause is represented in
contemporary women’s writing in French. Ageing, however, is a topic
which has started to receive attention in edited volumes about women’s
writing in French. Recent publications include Joy Charnley’s As
Time Goes By: Portraits of Age (2014) and Florence Ramond Jurney
and Karen McPherson’s Women’s Lives in Contemporary French and
Francophone Literature (2016). With the increasing popularity of
motherhood studies, a field which Gill Rye has helped to bring to the
forefront of scholarship on contemporary women’s writing in French,
childbirth is now emerging as a topic of interest for scholars researching
women’s literature from France. Works include Women’s Writing in
Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature (Damlé and Rye,
2013) and Motherhood in Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives from Europe (Rye et al., 2017). Nonetheless, studies
rarely compare representations of childbirth across cultures. This book
therefore is part of this emerging body of literature, but it also fills a
gap by comparing representations of childbirth in women’s writing
from Algeria, France, and Mauritius.
In fact, cross-cultural comparative studies on any aspect of contem-
porary women’s writing in French continue to be rare. Even though
women’s writing from Algeria, France, and Mauritius all foreground
the female body, there exists very little, if any, research that considers
these three cultural contexts together. When these literatures do appear
within the same publication, this is usually within edited volumes, and
therefore they are analysed in separate chapters without cross-cultural
comparisons being drawn. For example, Rye and Worton’s Women’s
Writing in Contemporary France: New Writers, New Literatures in
the 1990s (2002) treats works by French authors, such as Christine
Angot and Marie Darrieussecq, separately from Algerian authors such
