Natalie Edwards

Christopher Hogarth

Translingual Writing in French and Francophone Literature

Representations of gay, lesbian, queer and other non-heterosexualities on British terrestrial television have increased exponentially since the mid 1990s. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer characters now routinely populate mainstream series, while programmes like Queer as Folk (1999-2000), Tipping the Velvet (2002), Torchwood (2006- ) and Bad Girls (1999-2006) have foregrounded specifically gay and lesbian themes. This increase correlates to a number of gay-friendly changes in UK social policy pertaining to sexual behaviour and identity, changes precipitated by the election of Tony Blair’s Labour government in 1997. Focusing primarily on the decade following Blair’s installation as Prime Minister, this project examines a variety of gay, lesbian and queer-themed British television programmes in the context of their political, cultural and industrial determinants, with the goal of bridging the gap between the cultural product and the institutional factors which precipitated its creation. Ultimately, it aims to establish how and why this increase in LGBT and queer programming occurred when it did by relating it to the broader, government-sanctioned integration of gays, lesbians and queers into the imagined cultural mainstream of the UK. Unlike previous studies of lesbian, gay and queer film and television, which have tended to draw conclusions about cultural trends purely through textual analysis, this project uses government and broadcasting industry policy documents as well as detailed examination of specific television programmes to substantiate links between the cultural product and the wider world. The main body of the thesis comprises five chapters, including three industrial case studies examining the four main terrestrial broadcasters- Channel 4, Channel 5, ITV and the BBC- and their gay, lesbian and queer output between 1997 and 2007. Again by analysing policy documents and the distinct public service obligations of each broadcaster, these case studies link the brand identities and imagined audiences of each with the range and volume of LGBT and queer programming they produced within the ten year period studied. In doing so, they also consider the effect of digitisation and the multi-channel environment on the specific types of queer and LGBT programming provided by each broadcaster, and the impact of niche-market broadcasting on the presentation of sexual difference within the contemporary UK context.

Policy and Practice, 1997-2007

Queer British Television

How can you love someone if you don't even love yourself? That's what he said as he closed my car door; His words, no matter how hurtful and disheartening they were, propelled me to an endless pursuit of uncovering, discovering, and recovering from childhood wombs that lingered on for decades. This book offers insight into one woman's life experiences processing unprocessed childhood traumas. It's a series of brief chronicles illustrating a sequence of events that would impact her cognitive behavior; It's a quick read yet impactful just the same. This book sheds some light on the importance of being mentally present, processing traumas in the current time, and letting go.

Adulting Chilhood Trauma

Out of the Bleu

Mechanisms of Cardiorespiratory Control in OSA and the Influence of the Menstrual Cycle

This dissertation examines the way in which four female writers negotiate between "I" and "we" within their autobiographical writing. Recent scholarship on women's autobiography has suggested that women do not write "I" as a purely individual, unitary concept. Critics such as Francoise Lionnet, Nancy K. Miller, Jeanne Perrault and Susan Stanford Friedman have argued that women's autobiography is based upon plural, non-unitary, collective subjectivity.

Beyond "I" Versus "we".

The Autobiographies of Julia Kristeva, Gisèle Halimi, Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous

Missing Pieces

Linda Vettrus-Nichols

Kristy Russ

We are one woman and our words matter. Your words matter! My words matter! As women, we are individuals who can unite in authentic ways. I believe it is important to do our inner work and strengthen our own character so we can be a role model of compassion and success for other women. Having a conversation with a fellow entrepreneur turned into an interview idea for a Telesummit. Now 50 some interviews later we have 8 small books and a compilation book! I know you will enjoy these powerful stories and teachings. The chapters of this book showcase two of my interview guests. I ended up leaving the interviews in script format because they had such a beautiful flow and it was easier to read. I love getting people's messages out into the world; the messages that resonate with my message and what I am choosing to share. My message has evolved into a movement to unite women in love, nurture, and understanding by building a tribe of heart centered, supportive women who are confident and feel good about themselves, their skills, and their passions. I am a connector. I love connecting people to their soul and each other. I am good at helping people find clarity and releasing what no longer serves them. This book came about because I was feeling unfulfilled in my creativity. I was also hiding. In having a phone conversation one day I asked the person I was talking to if she would be open to having me do a phone interview that I could record and make into an Mp3. I told her I didn't know if I would put together an online summit and she was open to that idea as well. After 3 such interviews the title STUCK came to me and I went on to interview 14 women ages 16 to 77 about a time they were stuck in their lives. About 6 months later, after going through the process my husband Terry Earthwind Nichols created, I was all of a sudden okay with being on camera. I ended up interviewing over 50 women from my online classroom and turning those recordings into an Mp4 and sharing them through monthly online summits. The thing I enjoyed the most and what really brought out my skills and essence was the process I used to pull out a woman's true message by being her translator in order to bring out her truest self.

The Paradigm Shifters

There are many different ways to say 'I.' This book examines the ways in which four contemporary women writers (HZl_ne Cixous, Assia Djebar, Gis_le Halimi and Julia Kristeva) have written their autobiographical 'I' as a plural concept. These women refuse the individual 'I' of traditional autobiography by developing narrative strategies that multiply the voices in their texts. Each chapter examines a text, or a series of texts, that offers a different approach to writing a plural 'I.' Taken together, the texts depart from current theorizations of the female autobiographical 'I,' by calling for another category of identity; the women cannot write the self by using an individual 'I,' or by a collective 'we.' Instead, these texts rest uncomfortably between the pronouns 'I' and 'we' and thus call for different understandings of female selfhood and of collective belonging.

Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women's Autobiography

Shifting Subjects

Book Reviews

This book looks at first-person accounts of voluntary childlessness by women writing in French. It brings together authors who stake out a new terrain, creating a textual space in which to take ownership of their childlessness and call for new understandings of female identity beyond maternity.

Narratives of Non-mothering in French

Voicing Voluntary Childlessness

Waimea Bay, North Shore, Oahu. The night sea rages in a Paso Doble wrought from love and war. Light and darkness. Good and evil. Lilly Rose has waited all day with zealous determination to glimpse her angel on the horizon and up close. So she dives into the alchemy of a typhoon-rattled sea to find one Soon rip currents claim her as the deep sea pulls her under its abyss. Overhead, Colonel Skye Worthy soars with his army of angels on this night of reckoning, sent to battle The Raven and emit the light of Zion. But when he sees a light under the sea unexpectedly, he halts his direction and dives into the deep. It’s a divine collision. An angel and a human. Light on light. A moment Skye and Lilly Rose will never forget. Do you want to see the angels? Love finds you when light encroaches upon the darkness. In THE COLONEL, divine collisions orchestrate The King’s love unfurled on the earth to shine His light and defeat The Raven. New Zion is coming. Eternity will reign in endless goodness and perfect love. But every angel and every person must decide whom they want to follow: The King or The Raven. The dueling paradigms of Earth and Heaven paint the backdrop of a love story between Lilly and Skye where light shines, love rises, redemption prevails, and life ignites from The King who seeks to engender a world without evil.

The Colonel

Ann Miller

Amy L. Hubbell

Autobiography in France has taken a decidedly visual turn in recent years: photographs, shown or withheld, become evidence of what was, might have been, or cannot be said; photographers, filmmakers, and cartoonists undertake projects that explore issues of identity. Textual and Visual Selves investigates, from a variety of theoretical perspectives, the ways in which the textual and the visual combine in certain French works to reconfigure ideasãand imagesãof self-representation. Surprisingly, what these accounts reveal is that photography or film does not necessarily serve to shore up the referentiality of the autobiographical account: on the contrary, the inclusion of visual material can even increase indeterminacy and ambiguity. Far from offering documentary evidence of an extratextual self coincident with the I of the text, these images testify only to absence, loss, evasiveness, and the desire to avoid objectification. However, where Roland Barthes famously saw the photograph as a prefiguration of death, in this volume we see how the textual strategies deployed by these writers and artists result in work that is ultimately life-affirming.

Photography, Film, and Comic Art in French Autobiography

Textual & Visual Selves

Autobiography in France has taken a decidedly visual turn in recent years: photographs, shown or withheld, become evidence of what was, might have been, or cannot be said; photographers, filmmakers, and cartoonists undertake projects that explore issues of identity. Textual and Visual Selves investigates, from a variety of theoretical perspectives, the ways in which the textual and the visual combine in certain French works to reconfigure ideas—and images—of self-representation. Surprisingly, what these accounts reveal is that photography or film does not necessarily serve to shore up the referentiality of the autobiographical account: on the contrary, the inclusion of visual material can even increase indeterminacy and ambiguity. Far from offering documentary evidence of an extratextual self coincident with the “I” of the text, these images testify only to absence, loss, evasiveness, and the desire to avoid objectification. However, where Roland Barthes famously saw the photograph as a prefiguration of death, in this volume we see how the textual strategies deployed by these writers and artists result in work that is ultimately life-affirming.

Textual and Visual Selves

The Contemporary Francophone African Intellectual examines the issues with which the contemporary African intellectual engages, the fields s/he occupies, her/his residence and perspective, and her/his relations with the State and the people. In an increasingly economically deprived Africa, in which some states are ruled by dictators, what chances do people have of becoming intellectuals, using their critical faculties to challenge hegemony, enacting the transformative power of ideas in a public forum? Do intellectuals who remain in Africa run the risk of being swallowed into a vortex of hagiography? What is the responsibility of the intellectual in the face of an event such as the Rwandan genocide? What influence does religion have upon the contemporary intellectual’s work? Is migration one of the only paths available for African intellectuals, a number of whom have been critiquing their continent from within Europe? This volume focuses on the intellectual’s engagement across literature, philosophy, journalism and cultural criticism. It contains studies of established writers and philosophers as well as new voices. An African writer and public intellectual describes her own experience in and out of Africa in one chapter; a Philosophy Professor discusses his intellectual trajectory in another. Overall, this timely volume, which includes analysis of the work of intellectuals from North, East, West and Central Africa, problematizes our current understandings of the intellectual legacy of Africa and opens up new avenues into this understudied area.

The Contemporary Francophone African Intellectual

"Home" is a contested notion in contemporary literary and cultural studies, as critics assess the impact of empire, independence, migration and globalization upon colonial and postcolonial subjects. This volume assembles articles on the representation of home specifically in women's autobiography, which is now one of the most exciting and productive fields of literary studies. The chapters analyze writing from diverse areas of the Francophone world, including North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Indo-China, in addition to focussing on works by immigrant writers in France. The volume investigates the importance and the nuances of the construction of "home" in narratives of female identity in different contexts. This timely book includes original analyses by a range of scholars and studies both established writers, such as Maryse Condé, Marguerite Duras and Marie Cardinal, and newer voices such as Fatou Diome, Faïza Guène and Hélène Grimaud. Gender and Displacement: The Representation of Home in Francophone Women's Autobiography thus brings new understandings to the connections between race, gender, colonization and migration in female identity in diverse spaces.

"Home" in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography

Gender and Displacement

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."

Translingual Selves

Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women

The “Self” Which is Not One: Women’s Life-Writing in French, assembles articles on women’s life-writing from diverse areas of the Francophone world. It is comprised of nine chapters that discuss female writers from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, in addition to French writers. The idea of the self is currently attracting widespread interest in academia, most notably in the arts and humanities. The development of postmodernism supposes a fragmented “subject” formed from the network of available discourses, rather than a stable and coherent self. Jacques Derrida, for example, wrote that there is no longer any such things as a “full subject,” and Julia Kristeva now insists that the individual is a “subject in process.” The growing importance of psychoanalytic theory, particular in French studies, has also impacted upon this development. The basic tenet of psychoanalytic theory is that the individual is formed of a duality: the conscious and unconscious parts of the self which prevent the individual from ever fully knowing her/himself, and which thus insists upon a plural, incomplete self. Developments in the field of postcolonial studies have also made us aware of different ways of approaching the self in different parts of the world, and eroded the idea of a stable, conscious and complete self. As scholars examine these new ways of approaching the self, autobiography has been the subject of renewed interest. Several academic books have appeared in recent years that study the ways in which autobiographers represent the self as incomplete, evolving and elusive. In particular, a number of books have appeared on the subject of women’s autobiography and female subjectivity, such as works by Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson and Nancy Miller, and several volumes interrogate postcolonial women’s autobiography, such as texts by Françoise Lionnet, Gayatri Spivak, Carole Boyce Davies and Chandra Mohanty. Our volume unites these strands of criticism, by examining ways that female autobiographies write the self as a fragmented, plural construct across the Francophone world. This will be the first book-length study of this important development. This volume will be of interest primarily to students and scholars working in the areas of life-writing, French and Francophone studies, postcolonial studies and gender studies. The volume contributes to multiple areas that are currently garnering substantial interest in academe: postcolonial studies, Francophone studies, gender studies and women’s writing. By comparing works from across the Francophone world, our volume takes a global approach to the genre of autobiography and its inflections by women writers. The “Self” That is Not One in Women’s Autobiography in French therefore represents a timely intervention in several interlinking academic fields and will thus garner substantial interest.

Natalie Edwards

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