Introduction

Women In French Studies Introduction The essays in this volume represent a wide historical and geographic variety; they revolve around three main themes: "Women in Francophone Literature,' "Women and Autobiography," and "New Perspectives on Past and Modern Texts or Social Phenomena;" these perspectives are often informed by feminist theory. Most of the essays that deal with women in francophone literature emphasize themes characteristic of the post-colonial condition. The aftermath of colonization deeply scarred the psyche of the colonized people whose societies are plagued with economic problems and violence. Texts written by contemporary francophone women writers reflect some aspects of this situation. However, as our contributors show, each brings a different perspective stemming from the doubly marginalized position of women. Women have to cope with past colonial and the still present sexual oppression. The use of French, language of the colonizers, poses an additional problem, for francophone women writers who have to find their voice through a medium fraught with its own patriarchal prejudices. It is quite fitting to open this collection with Laurie Lavine's essay "The Feminizing ofthe Trojan Horse: Marie Chauvet's ?/???/* as War Machine," the winner of our WIF Graduate Student Essay Prize. This is particularly appropriate in view of current events in Haiti, since Lavine's essay deals with political violence and its effects on individuals, notably women. Lavine focuses on the anger that is caused by political repression in general, and especially that of women which has to be contained because of a gender code that prevents women from expressing their anger openly. It thus breeds ressentiment which, ultimately, leads to violent acts without bringing about true liberation. Lavine, using Wittig's "Trojan Horse" as a leading metaphor, successfully highlights the subversive qualities ofan "angry woman narrative." Valerie Orlando's essay "A la recherche du 'devenir femme' dans le Troisième Espace de Culture: Shérazade: 1 7 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts de Leila Sebbar" underscores the difficulty of the second generation of Algerian immigrants in France -les beurs- in finding their identity. An identity that is even more problematic for young women who, caught between two cultures and Women In French Studies belonging to neither one, must struggle against a repressive islamic code of femininity and their status as "Other" in a French society that carries its own patriarchal values. Orlando suggests that it is only in the troisième espace de culture-a destabilized and forever shifting place-that Shérazade, Sebbar's heroine, can initiate a dialogue between her Algerian heritage and her present condition as a young French woman and thus succeed in finding her unique identity. Susan Kevra's "Of Pigs and Princesses: Corporeal Currency in the 'Meat' Market. Themes of Consumption in Les Trois Petits Cochons" brings us to the world of French Canadian folktales. Les Trois Petits Cochons, she warns us, is not a tale with a virtuous moral. The conclusion, on the contrary, is "a final exoneration of trickery and domination" in which women, like pigs, are bartered in exchange for sexual favors and power. With much wit, Kevra unravels the threads of an apparently innocuous tale that, actually, reduces women to a mere object of consumption and market commodity. The next two essays could be read as a dialogue between two conflicting points of view on Assia Djebar's text, L'Amour, ?a fantasia. Andrea Page in "Rape or Copulation? Ambivalence and Complicity in Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia," raises the issue ofthe author's ambivalent position toward the French colonizers and the French language she chose to use. The French language is at once an instrument of oppression and of liberation for the writer. Page, in a provocative fashion, argues that Djebar both undermines the colonizer's culture and, at the same time, is in complicity with it, as she is unable to avoid and denounce a new system of oppression, that of the western patriarchal "mapping of the female body" conveyed by the French language. Page sees Djebar repelled as well as fascinated by a male western economy of rape," desiring as subject to be recognized in the oppressor's tongue (qtd in Page). "Assia Djebar et l'écriture...