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There's no place like home: homemaking, making home, and femininity in contemporary women's filmmaking and the literature of the MÉTROPOL and the MAGHREB

Weber-Fève, Stacey A.

Abstract Details

2006, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, French and Italian.
This dissertation examines the problematic location of home, the traditional female activity of homemaking, and the representation of female subjectivity in contemporary cinematic, (auto)biographical, and fictional texts by several contemporary French and Francophone women artists. These writers and filmmakers question the home as a female interior space in which female protagonists traditionally become objects or accessories. They also bring to the fore multiple representations of contemporary French, Algerian, and Tunisian femininity. In these texts, the artists embrace and foreground domestic space, female housekeeping activities, and women’s ideological roles in order to (re)appropriate the normative gender discourses of their homelands. They accomplish these goals by revealing how the home within each society functions subversively as a space of socio-political-historical contention. Using Assia Djebar’s work as a source of theoretical departure, this study illustrates the representation of women in body, by voice, and through the gaze in a collection of narratives created by French-speaking women artists from the Métropol and the Maghreb. Using feminist film theoretical and lifewriting critical perspectives, I examine the functions of the gaze and the effects of voicing the personal for women of France and North Africa. I also introduce theories of domesticity when considering the role and position of the home in the processes of personal identity formation and social gender construction. This dissertation considers women’s coming to voice through women’s (re)appropriation of hegemonic discourses of representation, use of language, and authority in speaking as made possible through the domestic space of the home and the arts of homemaking. Through a postcolonial lens of destabilization and the celebration of the in-between, hybrid spaces of first-person feminine expression and representation, I show how the relationship between “center” and “margin” becomes problematized and overturned in the work of Assia Djebar, Annie Ernaux, Simone de Beauvoir, Raja Amari, Coline Serreau, Leïla Sebbar, and Yamina Benguigui.
Judith Mayne (Advisor)
294 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Weber-Fève, S. A. (2006). There's no place like home: homemaking, making home, and femininity in contemporary women's filmmaking and the literature of the MÉTROPOL and the MAGHREB [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1148746370

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Weber-Fève, Stacey. There's no place like home: homemaking, making home, and femininity in contemporary women's filmmaking and the literature of the MÉTROPOL and the MAGHREB. 2006. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1148746370.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Weber-Fève, Stacey. "There's no place like home: homemaking, making home, and femininity in contemporary women's filmmaking and the literature of the MÉTROPOL and the MAGHREB." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1148746370

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)