{"title":"‘Demandez à une personne de confiance, comme votre mère’: Representations of mothers and daughters in Mademoiselle Âge Tendre, 1968–1971","authors":"Ryan Evelyn","doi":"10.1177/09571558241301318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558241301318","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers visual and narrative representations of mothers and daughters in the understudied publication Mademoiselle Âge Tendre. Issues spanning the years 1968 to 1971 suggest a marked interest – in some cases, a reliance – on the mother figure who, from an adolescent's point of view in the late 1960s, would most likely have been considered conservative, traditional and belonging to the older generation of women. A closer look at advertisements for menstrual products, advice columns, health and wellness write ups and celebrity exposés reveal diverse representations of the mother–daughter link ( le lien mère-fille) that oscillates between reliance and independence, thus bringing into focus the larger question of intergenerationality, la jeunesse and the socio-cultural implications of May 1968.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"85 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142831914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Through the glass, darkly: Femininity and the mirror in nineteenth-century France","authors":"Madison Mainwaring","doi":"10.1177/09571558241296024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558241296024","url":null,"abstract":"This article proposes an interrogation of the tropes of female narcissism with a material history of the mirror and women's accounts of looking at themselves in nineteenth-century France. Drawing from a range of sources in order to trace the introduction of the vanity into domestic spaces, I argue that the newfound availability of the looking glass, while encouraging a self-objectification in the eyes of the others, likewise allowed female subjects the fashioning of a critical eye, the ability to construct and play with femininity and imagine alternative ways of being. By historicizing the act of looking at one's reflection, I aim to turn the female gaze back on itself, providing a contextualization of women's self-understanding and perception dependent on material and embodied practices.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"82 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142789918","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The birth of fashion as complex phenomenon: Eesthetic rereading of Frederick Charles Worth's practice","authors":"Linda Muchová","doi":"10.1177/09571558241301320","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558241301320","url":null,"abstract":"Frederick Charles Worth (1825–1895) is consensually regarded as a founder of haute couture. His business was accompanied by unprecedented marketing strategies. These strategies included also the person of dressmaker in order to change his social status. In accordance with this, dressmaking is no longer just a craft; it has begun to aspire to the position of art. This article wants to show that the process of establishing “the field of haute couture” (Bourdieu) cannot be described only in sociological terms but contains a substantial esthetic dimension. Our analysis of Worth's social practices reveals a series of dialectical relations that constitute objects of fashion as such. The new institutional framework of haute couture inevitably accelerates changes in the material design of garments, which at the same time supports their moral obsolescence. In the second step, we discuss Charles Baudelaire's attempt to characterize the nature of specifically modern art. Baudelaire's formulations emphasize a very similar dialectical structure of modern beauty, which is constituted by its inclination to transience and decay. In this sense, Worth's innovative practice itself produces the esthetic quality of a single apparel. So, we can read Worth's haute couture as an instance of Baudelairian modern art.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142776572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Postcolonial frames in Michael Haneke's Caché","authors":"Nuri Batuhan Lüleci","doi":"10.1177/09571558241301321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558241301321","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that in Caché, politics, aesthetics and life collapse into one another by setting a dystopic simulacrum from which the spectator becomes emancipated. Caché critiques colonial-racist discourses within the France–Algeria context alongside the society of the spectacle, subverting binary categorisations such as form/content, ethics/aesthetics and diegetic/extradiegetic through staged hyperrealism, self-reflexivity and manipulations. It forces the anaesthetised spectator to confront the postcolonial uncanny in its naked truth. This article presents an original contribution to existing scholarship by linking Caché to the genesis and ongoing legacy of anti-colonial dissent and resistance in the history of Francophone cinema.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142776567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A double nightmare of racist violence in bande dessinée and film: Cauchemar Blanc (Moebius, 1974 and Kassovitz, 1991)","authors":"Elke Defever","doi":"10.1177/09571558241286636","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558241286636","url":null,"abstract":"The following article offers a comparative, contextualized analysis of two versions of Cauchemar Blanc: its initial iteration as a bande dessinée published in 1974 by Moebius and its cinematic adaptation in 1991 by Mathieu Kassovitz. By analyzing the aesthetic and discursive strategies used, the study demonstrates how the authors use visual media to expose the pervasiveness of racism in France. Though Kassovitz remains faithful to the original, his adaptation intensifies Moebius's critique of French attitudes toward immigration and the ethnic diversification of society through the addition of humor, which functions as a call for collective action and sociopolitical reform. A comparative analysis of the film and comic within their historical contexts reveals the aesthetic and political nuances of transitioning between mediums and highlights evolving discursive strategies used by Left-leaning artists between the mid-1970s and early 1990s, emphasizing the persistence of racism in France despite institutional efforts against it.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142597971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Le drame du migrant dans Cannibales de Mahi Binebine : anthropophagie, anthropémie et autophagie","authors":"Mohamed Semlali","doi":"10.1177/09571558241270440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558241270440","url":null,"abstract":"Mahi Binebine se veut un veilleur de mémoire qui consacre ses oeuvres aux laissés pour compte, aux victimes de l’innommable. Son roman Cannibales (1999) s’inscrit dans la mouvance d’une littérature qui interroge le drame de l’émigration clandestine et son cortège de cadavres et de rêves brisés. Attirés par le chant des sirènes de l’Eldorado européen, les candidats à l’émigration illégale, gavés d’illusions par les rabatteurs, se lancent à l’assaut de la Méditerranée sur des barques de fortune. Ceux qui ne périssent pas noyés, doivent affronter une amère désillusion et subir, comme Momo, une dévoration qui les vide de leur substance sans pour autant assurer leur intégration aux sociétés d’accueil où ils deviennent les proies favorites des mafias de la traite des êtres humains. Sur les deux bords, les clandestins doivent affronter une indifférence meurtrière qui les renvoie à leur condition d’invisibles, à leur vie de cafards.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142245480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"French universalist disparities: A racial capitalist reading of French universalism","authors":"Daniel N. Maroun","doi":"10.1177/09571558241270409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558241270409","url":null,"abstract":"This article unveils how the French political ideology of universalism benefits from the perpetual racialization of others. Drawing from various definitions and understandings of racial capitalism, I demonstrate how the success of universalism relies on the racialization of French society to strengthen its homogenizing cultural hegemony. Cedric Robinson notes that European civilization has historically demonstrated a tendency to differentiate social, cultural, and linguistic differences along racial lines and therefore becomes a distinctive subject of how racism and capitalism intersect in the form of a political ideology. I understand racial capitalism as a process where one derives social or economic value from the racial identity of another person. In this manner, I propose that universalism gains social and economic value by maintaining a racialized and differentiated social and working consciousness. To reinforce these observations, this article will examine various cultural events of the early 21st century where individuals of color and their labor are positioned as profitable entities for the Republic. These examples will highlight how certain French political agents employ universalism to assign socially tangible value to non-White bodies who adopt Republican values. The essay unfolds over three sections: firstly, an overview of the French universalist model and its contemporary crisis in light of a postimperial, pluralistic society; secondly, a theoretical reading of how racial capitalism and universalism intersect to produce and reproduce systemic inequalities that universalism purports to erase; and lastly, an analysis of various cultural examples that showcase how the institution of universalism, a cultural superstructure, depends on the infrastructure of non-White bodies to maintain its hegemony.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"143 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141994514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Original sufferhead”: The boy-child and masculine sufferings in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah n’est pas obligé and Les Soleils des Indépendances","authors":"Omotayo Ajileye Jemiluyi","doi":"10.1177/09571558241262682","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558241262682","url":null,"abstract":"Revered as one of the principal figures of contemporary African literature and one of the greatest francophone writers, the celebrated Ivorian author; Ahmadou Kourouma, is renowned for his criticism of colonial machination, Africa's political and social structure, and satirical writings. In his selected works for this study—“Allah n’est pas obligé” and “Soleils des indépendances,” he profoundly explores and examines the arduous journey of the boy-child and manhood and how they grapple with societal pressures, expectations, challenges, exploitations, and conflicts. More so, he expounds the complexities of masculinity and the challenges of being a “man” in an African society. Thus, this study comprehensively explores the narratives of Kourouma and punctiliously investigates how they illume the intricacies of masculinity and the course of the boy-child. By adopting literary analysis, this study anatomizes the plotlines and characters within the selected works of the Ivorian prodigy and elucidates how the tribulations of the boy-child and the man are vividly depicted. It probes the societal expectations, identity crises, and emotional turmoil linked to these characters who struggle to navigate the turbulent pathway to manhood. Additionally, it spills the allegorical significance of “original sufferhead,” a musical piece from the legendary Fela Anikulapo Kuti, serving as a puissant metaphor that captures the struggles of the boy and the man in a failing society.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"65 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141755362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creepypasta and “the Fabrègues Affair”: Imitation and aggression in a recent case of youth violence","authors":"Ian Williams Curtis","doi":"10.1177/09571558241264974","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558241264974","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a critical analysis of “the Fabrègues Affair” (2022), a case of youth violence in which two twelve-year-old girls carried out a series of stabbings, resulting in the death of one of their fathers. What was initially viewed as a simple “family tragedy [ drame intrafamilial]” ballooned into a national conversation when the girls claimed, after their arrest, that their violent act had been inspired by “creepypasta,” crowdsourced online horror fictions and videos. While the crime, in its purported relation to digital forms of storytelling, appears eminently specific to the present moment, and while news coverage consistently emphasized the girls’ femininity and sexual orientation in an apparent attempt to further sensationalize their act, the conventional wisdom, as it appears in media coverage of the case, exposes a striking reliance among commentators on outdated psychoanalytic models that do not attend to the specificities of the moment, or to questions of gender and sexuality. This article explores how theories of the relationship between imitation and aggression have been applied in “the Fabrègues Affair” before proposing alternative feminist approaches to understanding the social phenomenon of violent behaviors among girls who appear to draw inspiration from imaginary monsters. In doing so, it aims to contribute new perspectives, drawn from feminist theory and horror studies, to girlhood and childhood studies in the contemporary French context.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141736857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cultural encounters between Kaehwagi Chosŏn and modern France represented in the works of Kim T’akhwan and Sin Kyŏngsuk","authors":"Chan-Kyu Lee, Yoon-Jung Cho","doi":"10.1177/09571558241258203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558241258203","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates the diplomatic ties between Chosŏn and France during the Kaehwagi period, an enlightenment era in the Chosŏn Dynasty, through a comparative study of historical novels by Korean writers Kim T’akhwan and Sin Kyŏngsuk. Both authors feature Li Tsin, the first woman of her time to travel to Europe, who undergoes a transformative journey from a conservative Chosŏn lady to a modern, independent figure under the influence of French culture. The paper examines how Li's story reflects the complexities of a society caught between imperial powers and the role of modern Western culture in Korea. By analyzing the perspectives of major contemporary Korean writers on the notion of “the Other,” which represents the West and French modern culture, the study explores the significance of Li Tsin's life experiences and their impact on Korea's perception of the West. The paper aims to uncover the post-Eurocentric perspectives that have persisted from the Kaehwagi period to the present, and how the contemporary culture of France allowed for independent reflection, breaking romantic conventions and enabling an autonomous reception of French culture in Korea.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"30 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141385135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}