Pride 2022 with French & Italian Studies

Submitted by Amanda Demeter on
Image from cover of Devenir Non-Binaire en Français Contemporain, Mackenzie & Swamy

Happy Pride, French & Italian Studies faculty, staff, students, and friends! While there is no shortage of content and resources available from the broader college and university to celebrate our LGBTQIA+ community, we wanted to share a few unique FIS projects relating to queer and gender studies that we're particularly proud of.

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Louisa Mackenzie edited and published the volume Devenir Non-Binaire en Français Contemporain with Vinay Swamy (Vassar College) in February 2022. The book features the varied perspectives of eight academics, activists, authors, and researchers (including Mackenzie and Swamy themselves) on issues relating to the French language, non-binary identities, and inclusive language.

Professor Hannah Frydman published “Freedom’s Sex Problem: Classified Advertising, Law, and the Politics of Reading in Third Republic France” in French Historical Studies in October 2021. This article shows how French newspapers' classified texts became sites of regulatory indeterminacy, staging tensions between the regulation of “deviant” sexuality and republican ideals in Third Republican Paris. In late May, Prof. Frydman was announced as the winner of the Society for French Studies' Malcolm Bowie Prize for this article.

She also published “Reading Incognito: Periodicals, Sapphic Fictions, and Lesbian Communication" in Dix-Neuf: Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes in 2022. The paper explores how women seeking women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found ways of communicating privately in public in newspaper classifieds and correspondence sections by using characters, details, and tropes from the often misogynist nineteenth-century French sapphic canon (written primarily by men), and turning them away from their original moralizing ends.

Student Projects

In Prof. Louisa Mackenzie's Spring 2022 FRENCH 302: Cultures of the Francophone World:

  • Robyn Long (Master of Social Work student, FLAS French) created a flyer for K-12 schools providing information on inclusive French gender as her final project, which she plans to distribute to French-American schools in the area.
  • August Ruterbusch wrote a poem about inter-generational relations in the LGBT+ community.
  • Lukas Illa designed a Game of Life based on the career of the far-right French politician Marine Le Pen, with emphasis on how she has tried to white-wash her image in France's LGBT+ community.

In last year's first annual FIS Academic Awards (2021), two prize winners wrote about non-binary identity and gender-inclusive language:

LGBTQIA+ Issues in Francophone News

Diccionaire Le Robert made waves in November 2021 by adding the most popular gender neutral neo-pronoun in French, "iel," to their dictionary. The decision was met with applause by some and derision by others. See below for discussion of this milestone in both American and French publications (and the dictionary entry itself!).

Courses

The following are projected courses for the 2022-2023 academic year (subject to change):

Other Resources from UW

  • Celebrating Pride Month (College of Arts & Sciences): Features a collection of books, lectures, and other media from faculty, students, and staff affiliated with the college, including a highlight of Prof. Mackenzie's book Devenir Non-Binaire en Français Contemporain and related interview with Misty Shock Rule.
  • Celebrate Pride Month! (UW Libraries): Pulls together information on library resources and publications relating to women & gender studies and queer studies, exhibits, multimedia resources, and more.
  • Amplify Transgender Voices This Pride (Whole U): Includes resources on supporting LGBTQIA+ youth, local and national organizations to support.
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Faculty and Staff
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Related Fields
Francophone
French
Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies
Queer Studies
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