Category Archives: Feminism

Don’t call me Mademoiselle

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French feminists are calling for the salutation "Mademoiselle" to be done away with, and frankly I couldn't agree more.

The term itself is lovely. "Mademoiselle." Makes me think of young girls in full skirts and ballerina slippers. Something about the turn of the moi and the resolution of the selle. Like a girl twirling in a skirt, and then smoothing it down.

But as a practical term, it's endlessly irritating. When you occupy that shadow space between obvious girlhood and clear Madame-hood, every day is a long parade of people scrutinizing you to figure out what to call you. Are you married? How old, exactly, are you? Mademoiselle? ou Madame? they'll ask. (Docteur, I answered once.) Or they'll start with one– Madame?– and then change their minds– Ou plutôt Mademoiselle.  Or the reverse.

There may be more important things to think about other than what 51% of the population are called in the street. So then let's not think about this any longer: let's get rid of Mademoiselle. It's intrusive at best and condescending at worst. Or, let's bring back damoiseau.

 

The Ferocious Manifesto

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The poet Saeed Jones has called for the word "fierce" to be reclaimed from the likes of Tyra Banks (who "throw[s] it around like used fake eyelashes") and reinvested with queer, "menacingly wild" energy:

Fierce is Helene Cixous demanding in The School of The Dead that, as we write, we ask ourselves honestly “Am I writing? Am I burning? Or am I pretending?” Fierce is the urgency in Essex Hemphill’s voice in “For My Own Protection” as he declares “All I want to know / for my own protection / is are we capable / of whatever, whenever?” Fierce is the look I imagine Zora Neale Hurston had on her face when she said “I love myself when I am laughing and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.” It is Audre Lorde taking her seat for her panel at the Second Sex Conference in 1979, adjusting the microphone in front of her and calmly stating “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Fierce is the work of bloggers like Rod McCollum, Pam Spaulding, and Andres Duque whose coverage of LGBT news relevant to queer people of color is absolutely brilliant and crucial. Fierce is Sarah Schulman’s Ties That Bind. Fierce is Kai Wright’s Drifting Toward Love. Fierce is Jericho Brown’s Please. Fierce is Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw. Fierce is the first queer Latino winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize.

Fierce. Read more here.

A second second Second Sex

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The new translation of Simone de Beauvoir's foundational feminist work The Second Sex was published in the UK in late 2009 (I wrote about it here).  It took some time for Beauvoir scholars to work their way through it, and one critic in particular–feminist scholar and Duke professor Toril Moi– found the re-translation to be mostly a failure, tearing it apart in a recent essay in the London Review of Books.

Moi's essay has made such waves that Margaret Simons, philosopher professor and Beauvoir expert (and author of the original essay alerting everyone to the fact that the Parshley translation was incomplete and inaccurate), sent out a call on a philosophy list-serv for corrections to the UK edition, "which
the translators have another day or two to correct in the US edition." It's a relief, then, to know that although this translation may not be ideal, the howlers which Moi identified can at least be put right for the US edition (and future UK editions). I tend to think Moi will consider the flaws to be more than simply cosmetic; Simons, on the other hand, calls it a" tremendous advance over the Parshley translation in accuracy and completeness."

I guess we'll all have to stay tuned for la suite.

A second Second Sex

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Simone-de-beauvoir
 
Anglophone feminists, rejoice! The new English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's masterpiece The Second Sex was published in the UK this week by Jonathan Cape (with the American edition set for publication by Knopf in April 2010).

Viewed by many as feminism's foundational text, Gallimard published The Second Sex in two volumes (to mixed reviews) in 1949.  It sold extremely well (200,000 copies in its first week), and garnered Beauvoir followers in sectors of the French population who might otherwise have avoided the kind of philosophical treatises she was trained to write. The Second Sex broke down barriers, not least those of class and education.

An English translation appeared in the US in 1953, and was a bestseller there, too.  Except that the translation was performed by a zoologist, one H.M. Parshley, who struggled no doubt valiantly but produced quite a sub-par rendering of Beauvoir's idiosyncratic French prose. Also, he cut about 20% of the book, which he felt was irrelevant.

Beauvoir scholars have been saying for years that a new translation was desperately needed,* but it took Sarah Glazer's watershed 2004 New York Times article to raise general awareness of the problem.  Glazer writes,

In addition to misconstruing words and phrases, the American edition
deleted nearly 15 percent of the original French text (about 145
pages), seriously weakening the sections dealing with women's
literature and history — Beauvoir being one of the first to declare
these as legitimate subjects for study. Gone were numerous quotations
from women's novels and diaries, including those of Virginia Woolf,
Colette and Sophie Tolstoy, that she used to support her arguments.
Little-known historical accounts of women who defied feminine
stereotypes, like Renaissance noblewomen who led armies, also vanished
from the English edition.

What went wrong with ''The Second
Sex''? The answer may be as simple as the word ''sex.'' When Blanche
Knopf, wife of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf and an editor in her own
right, bought the book on a trip to France, she was under the
impression that it was ''a modern-day sex manual'' akin to the Kinsey
report, Deirdre Bair writes in her biography ''Simone de Beauvoir''
(1990). Alfred Knopf, who thought the book ''capable of making a very
wide appeal indeed'' among ''young ladies in places like Smith,''
sought out Howard Madison Parshley, a retired professor of zoology who
had written a book on human reproduction and regularly reviewed books
on sex for The New York Herald Tribune, to translate Beauvoir's book.
Parshley knew French only from his years as a student at Boston Latin
School and Harvard, and had no training in philosophy — certainly not
in the new movement known as existentialism, of which Beauvoir was an
adherent.

Capitalizing on the momentum kicked off by Glazer's article, Anne-Solange Noble, the foreign rights director of Gallimard, convinced Jonathan Cape and Knopf that they had to do a new translation, this time by translators who were feminists, who understood  Beauvoir's arguments, and who would restore the missing 20% of the book. Sheila Malovany-Chevallier and Constance Borde, two Americans living in Paris, won the commission, and, with the support of the Centre National du Livre, the contracts were signed and the re-translating began. (See also Sarah Glazer's 2007 article in Bookforum for more on how this came about.)

Le Monde has the up to date story here.

*For a scholarly accounting of what's missing from the Parshley translation, and some of the issues at stake in translating Beauvoir, here is Margaret Simons's groundbreaking 1983 article, and here is one by Toril Moi from 2001.

I haven't seen the new translation yet, but I hope to get my hands on a copy soon.

Flashback to the 1930s

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Did you hear about the "Time Warp Wives" piece in the Daily Mail? (via Jezebel.) Apparently there live in England three women determined to live their lives as if they were taking place in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, respectively.

I find the woman from the 1930s to be the most unhinged.  She tells the paper, "I (…) rarely read newspapers because I find today's world so depressing."

Does anyone else find it ironic that she finds today's world so depressing she'd rather pretend it's the Great Depression?

1930s

These women are, however, fully the product of their real-time era, however much they would like to forget it, as evidenced by their idealization of the period to which they have "escaped." Take, again, Miss 1930s.   She says, "The pace of life today is so hectic and I think there is so much pressure on women to be like men. It is all wrong."  If she wanted to get back to a time when women were "women," perhaps Victorian England have been a better match.  By the 1930s, the "modern woman" was well-established as an androgynous, independent figure, well-versed in un-manning men and un-sexing women.  Here's a 1925 description of the "modern woman":

These beings– without breasts, without hips, without 'underwear,' who smoke,  work, argue, and fight exactly like boys, and who, during the night at the Bois de Boulogne, with their heads swimming under several cocktails, seek out savory and acrobatic pleasures on the plush seats of 5 horsepower Citroens– these aren't young girls!
There aren't any more young girls! No more women either!*

Oh yes, that does sound like a society without any confusion between the sexes, where women knew their place and were content with the status quo.  Of course Miss 1930s is clearly channeling a more traditional domestic figure, the good wife, but this traditionalism hardly erases the fact that the 1930s was a period of intense reevaluation of what it meant to be a woman.

*a Parisian law student, quoted in Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (U Chicago Press, 1994).

Bernard-Henri Lévy on Beauvoir

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We must pay homage to the woman who, as Philippe Val noted in "La
Transmission Beauvoir," buried the ghost of Madame Bovary, her
hysteria, her "woman's illness," her suffering, which at the time
people thought was innate, eternal–and this in in Freud's time, before
modern thought appropriated his movement.

Don't miss BHL's homage to Simone de Beauvoir in The New Republic.

(and don't miss mine in The Quarterly Conversation!)

Hello, Simone de Beauvoir

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Just popping my head up to say hello.

And to mention that the summer edition of The Quarterly Conversation has just been published. In it, you will find an essay I wrote on Simone de Beauvoir's Cahiers de jeunesse, which published in France this past March.

You will also find an essay on an overlooked influence on Borges, Nigel Beale's review of Roberto Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas, Ravi Shankar on what comes after postmodern literature, and an essay on Donald Barthelme by Dan Green.

around the internet on a tuesday

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Ah, it’s good to be back compiling lists of links on a Tuesday morning. 

I’ve written briefly (here) of my feelings for Alberto Manguel, so it was a thrill to find this New York Times piece on his library.  If I could speak with Mr Manguel himself, however, I don’t think I would engage him in a conversation about the alchemy of reading, as I might have in the past; no, today I would ask him for advice on how to make a nomadic lifestyle compatible with a serious book habit. I leave for Tokyo on Thursday and I will be there for over three months, so I will need many books in that time; plus, I’ll be writing the first chapter of my dissertation and will want the collected works of Elizabeth Bowen with me to do so. My solution the past few trips is to have one suitcase for the clothes and another for the books, but I anticipate extra fees in the near future.  It seems like it would be an expensive proposition to mail them to Tokyo. And figuring out the research library at a Japanese university seems overly daunting. What to do?

*

"Why have there been no women artists?" Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay inquires, before embarking on a long career of discovering and recuperating the work of women artists as far back as the Renaissance. Thirty-odd years on, Ingrid D. Rowland writes, reviewing Nochlin’s latest book for the NYRB,  Women artists win!

*

"London is not one place but plural; 2000 years of history – compressed into a single space – can be found with every step," writes Leo Hollis in The Guardian Blogs. And Francise Prose looks at three interwar London novels by Patrick Hamilton in the NYRB (yes, again, sorry).

*
John Litchfield reports for the Independent that the original manuscript of the First Surrealist Manifesto (1924) will sell at Southeby’s tomorrow for an estimated 1M€, angering art historians and amusing André Breton’s ghost.

*

Finally: I haven’t said much about the anniversary of May 1968, not because I think there’s nothing more to say on the subject, but because, well, I’ve been busy.  So I refer you to that wondrous enigma of a blogger called Spurious, who provides an intriguing rundown of the events in a post organized around the writer and philosopher Maurice Blanchot.