Femmes Fatales

For a new generation of Quebec writers, sex is about everything but pleasure

by Marianne Ackerman

photograph by Amanda Tetrault

Published in the May 2008 issue.  » BUY ISSUE     

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Comments (4 comments)

Troy Anderson: I enjoyed reading this article but I would have liked to see some feminist analysis. Surely the author, and the writers being discussed, had something, anything, to say which would show an awareness that their success is perfectly normative within a patriarchy which places supreme value upon the sexualized woman. Sure, these writers may have garnered some supposedly new and improved power and status from their works, but it's not lost on me that they're still caged birds.
April 17, 2008 14:33 EST

larry gassan: This review illuminates the elliptical algebra of situational power and inequality of sex, which varies continually. "The Story of O" reveals slowly that sex is Theatre of Mind, and by the end the reader begins to wonder who is the neediest: O, or Sir Stephen.

But to the review: the sentence "Her diagnosis is essentially material: there are far more beautiful young women on the Plateau Mont-Royal than there are fuckable men—hence the brutality of the game." is blunt and unsparing in any analysis.

I'm grateful this review was not filtered through any dogmatic prism: feminism, Marxism, idiot man-child laddy-mag[ism], or stuffy Masterpiece Theatre bloviation.

Finally, the writers are not caged birds, although their subjects might be.
April 23, 2008 16:03 EST

Chantelle Oliver: The "caged bird" is really more of a cage turned into an easy chair.

Agency is tricky. The more you try to set someone free by making a laundry list of all their oppressions, the more bars their cages get.

Neither the women authors nor their protagonists are caged birds. To describe them that way is to take a totalitarian and ultimately dysphoric anti-feminist view.

There is no feminism. Only feminisms. A feminist is a woman who makes choices within and despite a socially oppressive system. Social activists, sex workers, personal assistants, homemakers ....anything is possible. Caged birds are bred and fed within patriarchal imaginings. April 25, 2008 12:27 EST

Francesco Sinibaldi: Notion of love.

In the sky
the sunny cloud
appears like a
delicate candle in
the song of your
heart, and sometimes,
when you pray
with clasped hands
recalling the past,
a young bird
arrives near the
sound of a footprint,
and ever delights,
in a notion of love.....

Francesco Sinibaldi
May 03, 2008 12:48 EST

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