Cherchez la femme: Women and Values in the Francophone World (review)

This collection of essays, some of which are written in English and some in French, is wide-ranging but coherent. The period covered extends from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. Geographically, essays span metropolitan France, New Caledonia, Haiti, Algeria, and Québec. The editors admit that their definition of 'values' cannot be pinned down to a single concept, since their aim is precisely to engage with multiple perspectives, taking in aesthetic, linguistic, cultural, and social values. The contributions focus on some of the ways in which women have destabilized the established order and/or introduced new values, as well as how women have been used to support male-dominated perspectives. Following the editors' Introduction, the volume is divided into four sections, which serve to organize the essays around the themes of feminisms, established values, the body, and life writing and identity. The Middle Ages are represented by two essays on Christine de Pizan (Kate Robin, Marcelline Block) and one on Claude de France (Lidia Radi). These belong to the second section, which also includes essays on the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries: here, Adriana Bontea is concerned with women and knowledge; Cécile Champonnois looks at travel correspondence, while Sarah Ruddy explores the figure of the suffering woman in French oratorio. Two essays on early twentieth-century texts by Rachilde (Adeline Soldin) and Natalie Clifford Barney (Chelsea Ray) concern these authors' respective relationship to reformist first-wave feminism, while Michèle Schaal enquires whether the work of Virginie Despentes at the other end of the century can be considered as a French third wave, and Raylene Ramsey shows how the work of Déwé Gorodé engages at once with Pacific identity, a woman-centred world, and the postcolonial cause. For her part, Katie Billotte explores how the media responded to the deaths of three Haitian feminists in the 2010 earthquake. The remaining essays in the collection deal with late twentieth- and twenty-first-century women's writing, with Laurie Corbin's essay on women's autobiography also including Colette alongside Marguerite Duras and Assia Djebar. Poetry is the topic of two essays on the body — on Marie-Claire Bancquart, and on Geneviève Guétemme's photographic collaboration with Béatrice Bonhomme. In the same section, Áine Larkin shows how the anorexic ballet dancer's body in Amélie Nothomb's Robert des noms propres relates both to fusion with and disidentification from the mother; and Erika Fülöp studies Nothomb's jouissance of writing across a range of texts and interviews. In the last section, the portrayal of obscenity in recent women's writing from Québec takes the family as a common target (Lucie Lequin) and Amy Allen Sekhar explores author Sylvie Germain's ethical dialogue with Lévinas through the motif of doubles and twins. Adrienne Angelo's essay on Nathalie Rheims's poetics of mourning closes the collection. The individual essays are all strong, being appropriately theorized, well contextualized, and well written. It makes for an even collection, and together the contributions offer valuable historically and culturally grounded insights into women's voices and creativity, and into women's resistance to and reworking of the values that impinge on their lives and experiences.