From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French

This book examines the representation of the female fertility cycle in contemporary Algerian, Mauritian, and French women’s writing. It focuses on menstruation, childbirth, and the menopause whilst also incorporating experiences such as miscarriage and abortion. This study frames its analysis of contemporary women’s writing by looking back to the pioneering work of the second-wave feminists. Second-wave feminist texts were the first to break the silence on key aspects of female experience which had thus far been largely overlooked or considered taboo. Second-wave feminist works have been criticised for applying their ’universal’ theories to all women, regardless of their ethnicity, socio-economic status, or sexuality. This book argues that contemporary women’s writing has continued the challenge against normative perceptions of the body that was originally launched by the second-wave feminists, whilst also taking a more nuanced, contextual and intersectional approach to corporeal experience. The cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach of this book is informed not only by critics of the second-wave feminist movement but also by sociological studies which consider how women’s bodily experiences are shaped by socio-cultural context.

Maria Kathryn Tomlinson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sheffield.