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Representation of Repression in Contemporary Francophone Women Writings. (Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association RMMLA)

Centennial by Davenport Hotel in Spokane, Washington
Organization: University of connecticut
Event: Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association RMMLA
Categories: French, Gender & Sexuality, Women's Studies
Event Date: 2025-10-16 to 2025-10-18 Abstract Due: 2025-02-28 Submit Abstract

Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Convention 2025 (RMMLA)

Women in French

Call for Papers

Representation of Repression in Contemporary Francophone Women Writings.

From the earliest writings of Francophone women to more contemporary reflections, authors have used their art to express and explore the marginalized, suppressed, and silenced aspects of identity and society. It has always included suppressed sensibilities, suppressing laws and cultures, suppressed passions, suppressed femininity, suppressed girlhood, suppressed being, etc. From Mariama Bâ's articulation of women's oppression through polygamy in Senegalese societies, Etel Adnan's examination of the intersection of gender and politics in the Lebanese world, Laure Conan's exploration of psychological sensibilities in Canadian society in the 19th century, to Maryse Condé's exploration of colonialism, slavery, race, ethnicity, and historical trauma, etc., women have devised systematic ways to convey repressed voices and emotions.

Julia Kristeva explores primal repression in her book Powers of Horror, which creates a gap between the abject and the subject. Thus, before the formation of the ego, something lies beyond and inaccessible to the logic and language of the subject. This primal repression emerges in emotions that the subject cannot articulate in language. It lies in feelings of intolerable significance and impossible reality. Eric Santner, in his lecture “Critique of Mana-theism: Narratives of debt,” elaborates on surplus scarcity due to a knowledge gap. For him, we came into the world with a sort of inadequacy embedded within us in a surplus scarcity. Thus, Manna holds the place of something forever withheld and knows something that our cognition can't recognize. This makes us convert this scarcity into a payable debt. This debt creates a compulsion that cannot be ignored. It is also beyond the access of language, so that any attempt to express it in language, does not express the debt, but the lack of language of expression. Therefore, when we read the authors’ ‘endless chatter’ around themes like disability, muteness, deafness, etc. suicide, politics, madness, etc., in Francophone women's writing, they express the lack of language to express primal repression.  

This panel is interested in all expressions of repression in Francophone women's writing. How do contemporary Francophone women authors represent repressed sensibilities in a world where language fails to express the depth of trauma? What literary techniques do these authors employ to convey the unutterable? How is repression communicated in their works? How has the representation of repression evolved through the years?  

Contributors are invited to submit an abstract of not more than two hundred and fifty words for a 15-minute panel presentation with a short bio to patience.odeh@uconn.edu for the RMMLA 2025 Convention in Spokane by February 28th, 2025.

 

ajeibiodeh@outlook.com

Patience Ajeibi Odeh