Raquelle Bostow

I am an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar at Fisk University and a Visiting Scholar at Vanderbilt University.

My current book project, Medusian Apparitions: Reading Contemporary French Prose with Hélène Cixous, explores the depiction of female bodies in three works of francophone literature in the late 20^th and 21^st centuries by way of Hélène Cixous’s writings on sexual difference and the Medusa. In the works of study, which include Standard (2014) by Nina Bouraoui, Sitt Marie Rose (1977) by Etel Adnan, and La répudiée (2000) by Eliette Abécassis, the male characters portray and contain the female protagonists as sexually dangerous bodies. Using primarily the lenses of Hélène Cixous’s writing on sexual difference from 1975 to 2015 and Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic notion of the “abject,” I label and examine the “dangerous/endangered paradigm” in a variety contexts: a contemporary Parisian suburb, the postcolonial intra-state war of Lebanon, and an ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Israel. This project ultimately uses Medusa as a tool for the radical, feminist realignment of old relationships between female bodies, danger, and death. Furthermore, the project insists on the contemporary pertinence of Cixous’s writing as a queer disturbance of heteronormative sexual difference.

Contact: raquelle.k.bostow@vanderbilt.edu

Curriculum Vitae