ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches gender through focusing on tensions between constraint and freedom as explored in women’s experimental writing in French at the start of the twenty-first century. It shows how social change and prevailing values and ideologies concerning women are finding their way into literature and related scholarship. Its central thread is the idea of crisis, including real experiences of gender-specific crisis and the perceived crises that are too readily attributed by society at large to women’s ongoing attempts to reject restrictive, naturalised ideas about their role and ‘place.’ The chapter focuses in particular on four aspects of women’s embodied experience that are finding new expression in women’s writing: mothering, sexual violence, eating disorders and ageing.
