Are You Trying to Play a White Woman?'La Mère Patrieand the Female Body in French West Africa

Bibliographic Data

ID2224357
AuthorsJennifer Anne Boittin (Pennsylvania State University, corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume40
Issue4
Pages841-864
Publication date2015-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSigns: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/680471
OpenAlexW2175436144
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited29

When they carved out a place for themselves in the colonial system of French West Africa, black and white women questioned how the romanticized white, bourgeois femininity that defined African girls’ education in the AOF (L’Afrique occidentale française) regulated and contested all women’s bodies, sexuality, and domesticity. Traditionally, administrators and observers construed white women as untouchable, opposing them to highly sensual and available black women. Yet in their everyday, lived experiences of colonialism, women and their bodies were not easy to manipulate, contain, or stereotype. This article analyzes how women in the French Empire pushed themselves to assume and resist normative interpretations of their race and gender and, in particular, how black African and white French women manipulated intersections between whiteness, sexuality, and femininity when establishing roles for women, black or white, in the French Empire. It pays particular attention to how women in the early twentieth century read both bodies’ physical and representational qualities, using embodiment to challenge not only what it meant to be French and a woman but also, therefore, to reevaluate who could lay claim to the social and cultural advantages of the idealized virtues associated with these attributes

Ancient history · Bourgeoisie · Colonialism · Empire · Femininity · Human sexuality · Masculinity · Normative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Stereotype (UML) · White (mutation) · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law · North African History and Literature · Psychology · Social Psychology

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