LESBIAN MOTHERING in FRENCH LITERATURE Thesis

REIMAGINING THE FAMILY? LESBIAN MOTHERING IN FRENCH LITERATURE Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Leicester by Robert Oliver Payne School of Arts University of Leicester September 2017 Abstract In the last two decades, gay and lesbian parenting has emerged as a highly contentious subject in France. The creation of the Pacte Civil de Solidarité in 1999 and the legalization of same-sex marriage and adoption in 2013 testify to the evolution of gay and lesbian parenting from a hidden practice into a public matter. The growing visibility of gay and lesbian parenting has coincided with the emergence of lesbian mothering as a literary theme. While texts portraying lesbian mothers remain small in number, the fact that most were published after 2000 suggests their being on the rise. This thesis engages with this nascent branch of French literature, focusing on ten texts published between 1970 and 2013. It thus encompasses the period from the birth of the modern gay and lesbian movement until the adoption of same-sex marriage in France. It shows how the texts both reflect changes to the family and contribute to political and theoretical debates on gay and lesbian parenting and, more broadly, to the redefining of mothering and family in twentieth- and twenty-first-century France. Acknowledgements There are many people whom I would like to thank for their contributions to this thesis. I first wish to express my eternal gratitude to my supervisors, Marion Krauthaker and Elizabeth Jones, for their advice, expertise, and support, as well as for sharing and fostering my passion for the subject of this thesis. I am also grateful to Nicole Fayard and Sharon Wood for their guidance during the early stages of this thesis. Nicole’s final year undergraduate module, ‘Gender and Power in Contemporary France’, is without doubt what inspired me to pursue postgraduate research in this field. I would also like to thank Claire Jenkins and Shirley Jordan for agreeing to act as examiners for this thesis. Other people have contributed to this thesis in ways that are more personal. I would like to thank the following colleagues and friends at the University of Leicester for being a vital source of encouragement and laughter during my four years as a PhD candidate: Adelina Hild, Aurélie Joubert, Clara Garavelli, Corinne Pelton, Emma Staniland, Inès Hassen, Karol Valderrama-Burgos, Marc Ripley, Michela Baldo, Michelle Harrison, and Sara Naylor; Marie Dehout, Simon Lambert, Sonia Alba, and Sonia Baï deserve a special mention for being the most amazing office buddies, and for putting up with the incessant chatter to which I have subjected them! Thank you also to my students for their role in making the last four years so enjoyable and memorable. Finally, I wish to acknowledge a number of people outside university whose constant presence and support have been, and continue to be, hugely important to me: first, my best friends, Rosemary Chell and Sarah Foster; and last but not least, Mum and Dad, Laura and James, Grandma Connie and Grandad Ernie. Table of Contents Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 3 Table of Contents 4 Introduction: Historicizing Lesbian Mothering 6 What This Thesis Does 14 Theorizing Lesbian Mothering 19 Early Psychoanalysis and Mothering 19 Feminism and Mothering 22 Essentialism, Constructionism, and Lesbian Mothering 29 Lesbianism, Literature, and Literary Criticism 44 Mothering, Literature, and Literary Criticism 47 Conclusion 52 Lesbianism and the Institution of Motherhood 54 Mothering as a Single-Minded Identity 56 The Mother–Daughter Relationship 65 Maternal Ambivalence 72 Conclusion 85 The Performativity of Mothering 87 Un père qui n’en est pas un? The Role of the Father in Lesbian Families 93 Lesbian Families and the Sameness–Difference Debate 106 Procréation médicalement… arbitraire 114 Conclusion 121 Beyond the Mother 123 The Role of Grandparents in Lesbian Families 125 Beyond the Family, Beyond the Narrative 135 Conclusion 145 Gender and Genre 147 The Novel 151 Writing the Self 163 Conclusion 178 Conclusion 180 Directions for Future Research 182 Bibliography 184 Introduction: Historicizing Lesbian Mothering In the last two decades, gay and lesbian parenting has emerged as a highly contentious subject in France. The creation of the Pacte Civil de Solidarité, or civil partnerships, in 1999 and the legalization of same-sex marriage and adoption in 2013 testify to the evolution of gay and lesbian parenting from a hidden practice into a public matter. This process is part of a progressive deconstruction of norms of gender, sexuality, and the family that first became obvious in the nineteenth century and accelerated in the twentieth. Since the 1970s, the nuclear family has been contested by the rising divorce rate, the increase in alternative family groupings, and the widespread availability of abortion and contraception. This introduction seeks to contextualize and explain the emergence of gay and lesbian parenting by tracing the transformation of gender norms and practices since the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century, gender roles were largely determined by the separation between public and private spheres: men controlled the public realms of politics and the workforce, which were equated with prestige; women were associated with the supposedly trivial, private matters of the family and home. This was widely perceived to be the result of innate sexual difference: because women carried children, women had to take care of them. Since women did not belong in the political sphere, then, they did not require the same political privileges and status as men. The 1789 Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen denied citizenship and the right to vote to women. Their economic and social dependency on men was then reaffirmed by the 1804 Civil Code, which defined women as the property of men, and by the abolishment of divorce in 1816. In practice, however, women did not always conform to the dominant image of woman as wife and mother. As Geneviève Fraisse and Michelle Perrot point out, the nineteenth century saw an expansion of female roles: women were indeed mothers, but they were also workers, and they could be single and emancipated.1 Moreover, women exploited the widely accepted link between mothering and the health of the nation to acquire education and employment rights that would provide the impetus for the overhaul of 1 Geneviève Fraisse and Michelle Perrot (eds), Histoire des femmes en Occident: Le XIXe siècle (Paris: Perrin, 2002 [1991]), p. 14. 6 patriarchal gender relations in the twentieth century. The expectation that mothers take responsibility for their children’s learning made women’s own education necessary. However, until the adoption of the 1881–82 Ferry Laws, which made public education free, compulsory, and secular, girls’ education remained unchanged from that of the pre- Revolution period.2 For most of the nineteenth century, then, education continued to be gender-specific: whereas boys studied geography and mathematics, girls were prepared for domestic and family life and were, fittingly, often schooled at home. While female education thus reified the ties between womanhood, domesticity, and mothering, it was undoubtedly a vital first step towards the educational opportunities that are now open to women and the questioning of pre-existing conceptions of motherhood. Furthermore, women’s participation in the workforce, although not a new phenomenon, became a subject of heated debate in the nineteenth century. Since a woman’s primary duty was as a wife and mother, contributions to these debates tended to uphold the gendered separation between public and private spheres—that is, the ‘prétendue opposition entre foyer et travail, maternité et salariat, féminité et productivité’.3 While attitudes towards female employment often reinforced gendered binary pairs, then, the very fact that debates began to be voiced on its acceptability and nature, and the attempt to reinforce women’s roles as wives and mothers, indicates the growing presence of women in the workforce and, more widely, the nascent troubling of gender relations and roles in the nineteenth century. The increasing participation of women in education and the workforce coincided with calls for women’s rights. In 1791, Olympe de Gouges published her response to the 1789 Déclaration, the Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne, in which she demanded male–female equality, women’s financial independence, and their right to enter politics, famously stating that ‘la femme a le droit de monter sur l’échafaud; elle doit avoir également celui de monter à la tribune’. Although de Gouges’s Déclaration had little immediate impact, her successors continued to press for women’s rights.4 Significantly, the term “feminism” was coined in 1837 by early socialist thinker Charles Fourier. The advancement of women’s rights henceforth became a political and social 2 For a discussion of nineteenth-century female education, see Françoise Mayeur, ‘L’Éducation des filles: Le Modèle laïque’, in Histoire des femmes, ed. by Fraisse and Perrot, pp. 281–301 (pp. 281–83). 3 Joan W. Scott, ‘La Travailleuse’, trans. by Geneviève Faure, in Histoire des femmes, ed. by Fraisse and Perrot, pp. 479–511 (p. 480). 4 For a discussion of nineteenth-century feminists’ demands, see Anne-Marie Käppeli, ‘Scènes féministes’, in Histoire des femmes, ed. by Fraisse and Perrot, pp. 575–613 (pp. 590–600). 7 movement formed in response to women’s exclusion from politics and the misogyny of society more broadly. In particular, scientific discourse, which in the nineteenth century came to be regarded as the truth, posited the inferiority of the female body and mind.5 In many medical treatises, female sexuality was portrayed as a myth or pathology. The theory of evolution was used to justify sexual inequality scientifically: the function of women as perpetuators of the species precluded their occupation of roles outside the home.

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