Special Session

French and Francophone / Gender and Sexuality

Michele Chossat (Seton Hill University)
chos@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This session investigates the evolving representations, agencies, and complexities of women and gender roles in contemporary French and Francophone literature and film. Moving beyond traditional binaries, this panel explores how modern authors and filmmakers depict individuals navigating shifting public and private spheres, changing family dynamics, and evolving sexual norms. We invite proposals that examine how contemporary cultural production revisits, subverts, or reimagines gendered challenges once explored by previous generations of feminist writers and activists.

This panel invites interdisciplinary approaches to the study of women and gender in the contemporary French-speaking world. We seek papers that explore how French and Francophone literature and cinema reflect, critique, and shape modern lived experiences across diverse cultural landscapes.

We welcome proposals utilizing intersectional, postcolonial, queer, decolonial, Marxist, and New Historicist frameworks. Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:

· Socio-Political Spheres: Women’s relationship to labor, education, political power, and domesticity.

· Mobility and Space: Narratives of migration, diaspora, exile, and the gendered dynamics of urban vs. private spaces.

· Memory and History: Recapturing marginalized histories, collective memory, and the rewriting of colonial/postcolonial archives.

· Evolving Masculinities and Partnerships: How shifting gender roles have concurrently transformed representations of male partners, fatherhood, and domestic dynamics.

· Body Politics and Identity: Textual and cinematic explorations of queer identities, aging, disability, and transnormative experiences in the Francophone world.