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Marie-Jo Bonnet
What Does a Woman Desire when She Desires a Woman?
The desire of women for their own sex is a subject that has been concealed and heavily censored since Antiquity. Yet it has constantly resurfaced throughout history - despite repression, denial and today's feigned indifference - and its existence is a historical and anthropological fact, whatever the dominant opinion may say. Marie-Jo Bonnet argues that lesbianism transgresses social norms and female stereotypes, and breaks with the phallic model and the restricted social role that is assigned to women even today. She sees lesbian desire as a radical instrument of emancipation and offers an original analysis of the women's liberation movement, of recent discussions about homosexuality and, finally, of the persistence of lesbophobia. Desire, regardless of its subject, is always a unique and complex experience, and Bonnet does not ignore this fact. In an original, wide-ranging study of lesbian love through literature, she delves into the work of such major writers of the past as Marguerite Yourcenar, Violette Leduc, Simone de Beauvoir, Djuna Barnes and, surprisingly, Madame de Sévigné, as well as of more recent writers such as Monique Wittig, Anne Garreta and Christine Angot. The author's thesis is that women's desire for their own sex can serve as a tool to empower them to conquer their own space of creativity and liberation. Marie-Jo Bonnet, a writer and historian, is the author of Les Relations Amoureuses Entre Femmes (XVIe-XXe siècle).
Rachel Mazuy
Believing Rather Than Seeing ? Travels in Soviet Russia (1919-1939)
The Russian Revolution provided the working-class movement with a concrete model of socialism. For French militants, as well as for many members of the cultural and political elite, the Soviet Union became the goal of a secular pilgrimage (or an anti-pilgrimage). This book tells the story of those travellers. Who went on such trips? How and why? To what extent did the trip influence their political and social development? Rachel Mazuy is a lecturer at the Institut dEtudes Politiques, in Paris, and teaches at the Lycée Honoré Balzac, Paris.
Yves Pouliquen
Cabanis: An Ideologue’s Life
The brilliant intellectual life of the French Revolutionary period is vividly revived here in this biography of Cabanis, physician, physiologist and Enlightenment philosopher.
