Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island March 6–9, 2027
Panel Chair: Adrienne Angelo
Session format: Traditional panel
Session title: Care and Embodied Vulnerability in Contemporary Francophone Studies
Session proposal:
Contemporary Francophone cultural production increasingly turns to bodies under pressure: exhausted bodies, ill bodies, racialized and gendered bodies, aging bodies, maternal bodies, traumatized bodies, and bodies entangled with damaged environments. Drawing on feminist care ethics, from Joan Tronto’s insistence that care must be understood as a matter of politics, democracy, and justice to Pascale Molinier’s work on the gendered, affective, and often invisible labor of care, this session invites papers that examine how women, queer, and gender-expansive writers, filmmakers, artists, and thinkers represent embodied vulnerability as a relational and political condition that exposes the uneven distribution of care. Rather than approaching care as a purely private or ethical practice, this session asks how care is demanded, refused, withheld, institutionalized, or made impossible in Francophone cultural texts. How do cultural works represent bodies that require care, bodies that provide care, and bodies abandoned by families, institutions, states, or communities? How do gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, illness, age, migration, colonial history, and ecological precarity shape who is expected to care, who is deemed worthy of care, and whose vulnerability remains unseen? By placing feminist care ethics in dialogue with embodied vulnerability, this panel asks how contemporary Francophone cultural production gives form to dependence, exposure, and survival as political questions. What kinds of feminist critique become possible when vulnerability is understood as a condition shared unequally across human and more-than-human life? Papers may address literature, cinema, visual culture, philosophy, life writing, or other cultural forms that explore these questions in relation to the forms of embodied vulnerability and care relations outlined above. The session especially welcomes approaches grounded in feminist theory, care ethics, affect theory, medical humanities, disability studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonial/decolonial feminisms.
Please submit directly your abstract to the panel chair:
Adrienne Angelo
Professor of French
Auburn University
ama0002@auburn.edu
