This multidisciplinary seminar aims to build links between young researchers in the Auvergne Rhône-Alpes region. The chosen subject, that of female creation, remains marginalized in research, and this seminar aims to promote exchanges on this field, which requires thinking outside the box. This different path is necessary to follow in the footsteps of women creators, who have too often been marginalized and excluded from creative circuits. Thinking about the margins and the creations of women thus pushes us towards questioning our work as young researchers, also fueled by the voices of creators who often challenge the exclusion of which they are victims. The work of young researchers then ends up being a work of repair, of correction of a past injustice; it is a work not only of scientific study but also of “visibilization”. In this sense, the seminar also aims to be a place for interventions by women creators, in order to establish a dialogue between researchers and research objects. The seminar is intended to be itinerant, and may take place at a different university in the region each session.
Session 1: A poetics of weaving: creating by weaving, reading weavings, September 18, 2024, Université Clermont Auvergne
This seminar will bring together doctoral students working on the works or, more broadly, the work of women, whether in literature, translation, publishing, art, crafts and music. The concept of weaving encompasses the issues related to these artifacts: weaving, and textile arts in general, is a practice historically considered feminine, it is rarely granted the quality of art. However, these arts that may have been associated with forms of alienation or servitude can also be diverted to become tools of emancipation. Let us think for example of Penelope who subverts the act of weaving to maintain her autonomy. In this line, the Spanish artist Teresa Lanceta breaks with the patriarchal conception of weaving, introducing it as an artistic practice that has its place in a museum, and which is the product of multi-cultural know-how. Weaving can thus be, for women, a method of creation (let us recall that the word “text” comes from the Latin textum which also means to weave, to braid, to interlace). For example, the poet Chantal Maillard bases her poetics on the art of spinning emotions using a spindle, an avatar of the pen.
Let us also think about intermedial writings, which allow us to weave links between different artistic disciplines: in his installation The dinner partyAmerican contemporary artist Judy Chicago sets a table for thirty-nine female history makers, such as Sappho and Georgia O’Keeffe. Chicago assigns each guest a uniquely embroidered and woven tablecloth.
Session 2: Verses of one’s own: weaving feminist poetry, December 11, ENS de Lyon
Weaving contains within itself the tension, the problematic inherent in the feminist reading of women’s productions: should we study them according to their specificity, here, of gender, or according to their “universal” value? The exaltation of the “feminine point of view” as different by nature, as Hélène Cixous did, has long been decried. Monique Wittig thus states: “”Writing women” is the naturalizing metaphor of the brutal political fact of the domination of women and as such magnifies the apparatus under which “femininity” advances: Difference, Specificity, Body/Female/Nature. (…) Feminine writing is like domestic arts and cooking”. However, we must not reject any reappropriation of patriarchal constraints and canons, and on the contrary note the power of the half-word, of the subtle, of the diversion, in women’s literature. Thus, the Catalan poet Maria Mercè-Marçal affirms, about Rosa Leveroni, that her creative gesture consists of tirelessly weaving a new tapestry that adversity undoes. Weaving would therefore be for women an act of resilience.
Session 3: “Weaving the Sources”: Translations, Rewritings and Anthologies, February 2025
It may also be relevant to illuminate the motif of weaving through the prism of translation. Indeed, in many ways the translator can be compared to a weaver, whose work is often invisible and undervalued. For example, the work of the Scottish writer Willa Muir, who translated most of Kafka’s four novels, is overshadowed in favor of an authority granted to her husband, Edwin Muir.
The weaving motif also allows us to embrace strategies for adapting to the target audience, which can lead the translator to weave together references from different cultural areas. From then on, a continuum would be created from translation to the rewriting of the source texts, a continuum that can be appreciated through the prism of weaving: the more the translator “weaves” sources together, the more she would slide towards a rewriting of the original text. Thus, when she adapts Chinese and Japanese plays to the Belle Epoque, Judith Gautier constantly weaves together Asian sources with Western sources, which allows her to remotivate certain representations of China and Japan while seducing the French public. We find this braiding motif in The Book of Jadeher anthology of Chinese poetry in which she interweaves verses translated from Chinese with her own poetic creations.
Rewriting can also be a way of reclaiming a feminine tradition in literature. This is evidenced by the omnipresence of Sappho in contemporary poetry: Renée Vivien translates her, Carmen Conde rewrites her, and Ana-María Martínez Sagi presents herself as her alter-ego.
If the weaving motif applies to the microstructural scale of a translation, it can also be found at the macrostructural scale of an anthology. Therefore, the anthological gesture certainly allows for selection but also for weaving a dialogue between texts that are a priori distant from each other. Thus, when translators choose to offer a greater proportion of women writers in their anthologies, the macrostructural weaving that they operate offers another literary canon.
Session 4: Networks and correspondences: weaving resistance, April 2025
The myth of Arachne, one of the most famous weavers in the Western collective imagination, presents weaving as an individual activity, which can even put women in deadly competition (Arachne hangs herself before being transformed into a spider). But contrary to this patriarchal myth, weaving is often a way of founding a community of mutual support and promotion of creation. This practice has become an artistic medium of feminist protest in Latin American countries such as Mexico and Colombia. It also reconnects with indigenous traditions. This is part of a “care” approach, a policy of care that aims to achieve the autonomy of marginalized women. This is evidenced by the Spanish-language slogan “Me cuidan mis amigas, no la policía” (“It’s my friends who take care of me, not the police”).
Weaving is therefore a way of counteracting the forced isolation of patriarchy. We will therefore have to look at the role of friendships or love between women and women’s networks within creation. This is notably the case of the Banana Garden Poetic Society (Jiaoyuan shishe 蕉園詩社) in Hangzhou, in China at the end of the 17th century, founded by or for literate women. These women’s networks can also lead to editorial projects, as was the case in Japan through the magazine Seitō (青鞜), in order to offer a space of expression for creative women.
Session 5: Mé-tissages: Weaving your identity through creation, June 2025
The Catalan poet Maria-Mercè Marçal defines herself, from the first poem of Fall of Moonsher first collection, as “three times rebel”, because she is a woman, working class and from an “oppressed nation”. All her poetry can be seen as an enterprise of weaving together these three aspects of her identity. Within patriarchy, in which women are often fragmented (for example, by the “male gaze” theorized by Laura Mulvey), creation can thus be a way of giving meaning to a marginalized existence, in order to be able to find a place within society.
Artistic creation can also have a transcultural dimension, weaving several linguistic identities within the same work. The communications could thus focus on women who make cross-breeding the driving force of their artistic and literary production. Shan Sa, a writer of Chinese origin, thus offers in her novels a writing that is thought in Chinese and written in French. These writers thus produce texts that we can describe as heterolingual, at the crossroads of several languages, as is the case with the novel Little Mother by Cristina Ali Farah, which is written in Italian while leaving a large space for Somali. We can also think of the Chicana writer Cherríe Morraga, who writes in English and Spanish in her autobiography Loving in the war years (which never passed through his lips), where we also find a mix of poetry and prose.
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Proposals for the first session should be sent by August 14, 2024 to [email protected] and [email protected].
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Indicative bibliography
BELLA María, « Glitch: notations for weaving with what disappears », Lectora: women’s magazine and textuality2021, n°27, pp. 175-188.
BREY Iris, The female gaze: a revolution on screenParis, Editions de l’Olivier, 2020.
CHIKHAOUI Naima, “Weaving… from textile to discourse: feminine words of an intangible heritage”, Moroccan Archaeology Bulletin2020, n°25, pp. 327-351.
CIXOUS Helen, The Laughter of the Jellyfish and Other IroniesParis, Editions Galilée, 2010.
CLEYTON Barbara, A Penelopean Poetics. Reweaving the Feminine in Homer’s OdysseyLanham, Lexington Books, 2004.
GEFEN Alexandre, Repairing the world: French literature in the 21st centuryParis, Editions Corti, 2017.
MAGFELAINE-ANDRIANJAFITRIMO Valérie, “Women writers from Mauritius and Reunion: “weaving scattered threads””, Intercultural FrancophoniesNov-Dec 2015, pp.9–29, hal-01501117.
MERINO GARCIA Leonor, “Assia Djebar or the art of weaving the sentence: A caravel, its wings spread, titillating, towards the process of creation with empátheia–hermeneutics of love”, Al Khitab2013, n°16, pp. 72-61
MISHRA AMPRUT, Weaving Against Empire: Warped Feminism, Aesthetics, And The Archives Of Fabric And Textile Art2023, https://doi.org/10.17615/wm1m-xg96.
MOLINIER Pascale, What is care? Concern for others, sensitivity, responsibilityParis, Editions Payot & Rivages, 2009.
RAMON Esther, « Weaving the cry: a theory of knowledge », Minerva: Magazine of the Circle of Fine Arts2009, n°10, pp. 53-55.
RAOUI Hanane, Weaving around Angelica Kauffmann and her Penelope2013, hal-01688884v2.
RHOUMA Neila, “Berber weaving: a feminine heritage”, Women of the Mediterranean. Women and Memoryjuin 2019, Sorrento, Italie, hal-03195647 .
RICH Adrienne, Essential essays: culture, politics and the art of poetryW. W. Norton & Company, 2018.
TORNSEY Cheryl, ELSLEY Judy, Quilt Culture: Tracing the PatternColumbia, University of Missouri Press, 1994.
WITTIG Monique, Straight thinkingParis, Editions Amsterdam, 2018.
WOOLF Virginia, A Room of One’s OwnLondres, Penguin Books, 2000.
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