“Elles sont en merritoire” : Feminist Representations of Space and Mobility in Michèle Causse’s Work | Research Seminar
Paper presented by Dr Cecilia Benaglia (University of Limerick) on Tuesday 3rd March, 11-12 in room 1:24, O'Rahilly Building and online (Teams link).
This paper focuses on Michèle Causse (1936-2010), a French radical lesbian writer whose work is grounded in the political lesbianism of the 1970s and 1980s. My aim is to examine Causse’s reflections on language as a site of feminist struggle in relation to another key dimension of her writing: her engagement with space, displacement and mobility. As Blunt and Rose note in Writing Women and Space. Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (1994), “Western feminisms have always been concerned with the spatial politics of difference.” Causse deeply shares this concern likewise seeing “[…] space as central both to masculinist power and to feminist resistance”. How can we situate her work within broader Western feminist constructions of space from the 1980s and 1990s? I will study how discussions of gendered mobilities and imagined geographies are articulated across Causse's theoretical and fictional work. I will also pay particular attention to how spatial representations translate into literary terms and are expressed at the narrative level, through the analysis of her novel Voyages de la Grande Naine en Androssie (1993).
Cecilia Benaglia is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Her research interests include feminist and gender studies, translation and multilingualism studies, cultural transfer studies and sociology of literature. Her work has appeared in a variety of European and North American journals. Her book Engagements de la forme. Une sociolecture des oeuvres de Carlo Emilio Gadda et Claude Simon came out in 2020 with Classiques Garnier. She is the translator of Pascale Casanova’s La République mondiale des lettres in Italian, published by nottetempo edizioni in 2023.
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