Sexual Exposure, Self-Concealment – Women’s Bodies in Collaborative Phototexts

Studies in Culture Research Cluster and Translating & Interpreting Research Cluster: Joint Seminar

Abstract:

This paper examines the portrayal of women’s sexualised, desired, and desiring bodies through the combined use of photography and autobiographical writing. Specifically, it analyses collaboratively produced phototexts by romantic duos Annie Ernaux/Marc Marie and Catherine Millet/Jacques Henric: L'Usage de la photo (2005) [The Use of the Photograph] is co-authored by Ernaux and her sexual partner at the time, Marie; Millet’s La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. (2001) [The Sexual Life of Catherine M.] makes reference to the nude photographs of her taken by her husband, Henric, such that I propose to interpret this text alongside the photographs in Henric’s Légendes de Catherine M. (2001) [Legends of Catherine M.].

In these works, women’s bodies are both objects and subjects of desire. The fact that they are co-authored by a heterosexual couple is therefore not anodyne: collaboration recalls the gendered nature of the power dynamics inherent in the act of looking, particularly when representing women’s bodies and sexuality. I argue that, although the works incorporate scopophilic gaze relations, the two women authors nonetheless have a degree of agency over the portrayal of their own bodies: they obscure chosen aspects of self and thus avoid a wholly androcentric and fixed portrayal of their bodies and sexual experience. My paper therefore demonstrates how self-concealment can occur even when women explicitly expose their sexual lives in a daring and highly intimate way. This is in part enabled by the text, which foregrounds how the narrator conceives of sexual exposure, in turn revealing how she uses photography to control the terms of self-representation.

Works Cited

Ernaux, Annie, and Marc Marie. 2005. L’Usage de la photo. Paris: Gallimard.

Henric, Jacques. 2001. Légendes de Catherine M. Paris: Denoël.

Millet, Catherine. 2001. La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. Paris: Seuil.

Speaker:

Beth Kearney is a third-year PhD candidate at the University of Queensland, writing a thesis titled ‘Unfixing Self: 21st Century Phototexts by French and Francophone Women’. Examining autobiographical phototexts published by women authors from across the francophone world, the thesis argues that photography and autobiographical writing are mobilised to refuse or undermine a fixed representation of self. Beth has published on this topic and others in national and international journals. In 2022, she was Lecturer in French Studies at the University of New England and now teaches casually in French language and literature at the University of Queensland.