Voix Blanche?

Title: Voix Blanche?

Description:

One of the most important ‘nouvelle vérités’ that has challenged 1970s feminisms in the Anglophone world is intersectionality, and particularly the need to address race and ethnicity as constantly interacting with gender, sexuality, class and other variables; This chapter provides some general reflections on the extent to which a similar crisis and trajectory are present in French feminist histories and narratives, but its main focus is a case-study of Annie Ernaux’s work in this regard, considering questions that have rarely been asked in Ernaux criticism to date: to what extent does Ernaux engage with race and ethnicity as well as class and gender in her writing? If she is an unusually intersectional writer in terms of gender, sexuality and class, and in more recent years one might add age and ageing, does this approach and the strong influence of sociology on Ernaux’s writing lead to awareness of dimensions of oppression that she herself as a white French woman has not personally experienced? How does Ernaux write her own whiteness? Is the ‘I’ of Ernaux’s texts, whether fictional or autobiographical, ‘unevoix blanche’, adopting the cloak of universal whiteness?.