Violence and Rebellion in Contemporary French Women’s Autofiction

This book breaks the silence on systemic violence against women in French society and showcases various forms of actual and/or literary rebellion.

Blending auto-ethnography with the analysis of contemporary autofiction by French women writers and drawing portraits of other victims/rebels, Michèle Bacholle addresses physical, symbolic, cultural, institutional, and psychological forms of gender violence across different social spheres and within an intersectional framework (i.e., age, class, immigration, race).

She engages with established authors such as Nina Bouraoui, Sophie Chauveau, Chloé Delaume, Virginie Despentes, Annie Ernaux, Camille Laurens, Linda Lê, Léonora Miano, and Delphine de Vigan, as well as emerging voices in French literature like Mathieu Deslandes and Zineb Dryef, Rokhaya Diallo, Laure Gouraige, Bebe Melkor-Kadior, and Samira Sedira. Bacholle bridges personal and scholarly discourse in an innovative manner.

#MeToo and its repercussions, as well as current social movements, provide hope for deeper societal change, short of which, following Adèle Haenel’s lead, French women may have to “stand up and split.”