Women in Transition: Crossing Boundaries, Crossing Borders

On 7 May 2021 the volume of interdisciplinary essays Women in Transition: Crossing Boundaries, Crossing Borders, co-edited by Claire Williams (St Peter’s College, Oxford) and Maria-José Blanco (King’s College London), will be published by Routledge as part of their ‘Studies in Comparative Literature’ series. https://www.routledge.com/Women-in-Transition-Crossing-Boundaries-Crossing-Borders/Blanco-Williams/p/book/9780367443061 

The volume started life in the wake of a three-day conference held at Kings College London and St Peter’s College in September 2018: https://transitionwomen.wordpress.com. Another co-edited collection resulting from the conference, Feminine Plural: Women in Transition in the Luso-hispanic World, is under contract to Peter Lang and due to be published later this year.

Women in Transition reproduces the interdisciplinary, multi-genre and multicultural nature of the conference through the contributors themselves, from a variety of traditions, backgrounds and countries, but also in the ways they approach the topic of ‘women in transition’: literally and metaphorically; as authors, subjects and objects; in blogs, graphic novels, sculpture, poetry, history, psychotherapy, film, travel writing, auto/biography and cultural studies. The international and transhistorical approach brings together different cultures and genres in order to emphasise the links and connections that bring and bind women together, rather than those which separate them. An emphasis on women’s life-writing predominates in the volume, particularly in the autobiographical chapters by Mònica Rovira, Anna Johnson, the Istanbul Queer Art Collective and Marcia Thompson, as well as the reflections by Adalgisa Giorgio on Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend quadrilogy.

Chapter 1: Mònica Rovira (Filmmaker, Barcelona), ‘The Making of To See a Woman’; Chapter 2: Diana Aramburu (University of California, Davis), ‘Exposing the Monstrous Double: The Body in Crisis in Meritxell Bosch’s Graphic Autobiography’; Chapter 3: Maria-José Blanco (King’s College London), ‘Filling in the Gaps between Childhood and Menopause in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama’; Chapter 4: Edward Scrivens (University of Oxford), ‘Dichotomies of the Feminine: Mediating Women and the Boundaries of the Primordial in Ancient Egyptian Textual Culture’; Chapter 5: Anna Johnson (Writer, London), ‘Cascading Transitions: Becoming a Writer and Engaging with Neurodiversity in Response to Motherhood’; Chapter 6: Feifei Zhan (SOAS), ‘The Ambiguity of Pain: Self, Fragments and Female Connection in Chen Ran’s A Private Life’; Chapter 7: Marcia Thompson (Artist, London), ‘Vanishing Lines’; Chapter 8: Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergul (Performing Artists and Academics, London), ‘Border Crossing Bibliophiles: Just in Bookcase by Istanbul Queer Art Collective’; Chapter 9: Indrani Karmakar (Rhodes University, South Africa), ‘Transitional Figures: Partition, Victimhood and Agency in Two Fictions by Jyotirmoyee Devi’; Chapter 10: Marta Arnaldi (University of Oxford), ‘Transnational Melancholia: Depression and Exile in Italian Women’s Poetry from Early-Modern to Contemporary Age’; Chapter 11: Sandra Daroczi (University of Bath), ‘Narrative Horse Power in Julia Kristeva’s Fiction: Reading Movement in Meurtre à Byzance (2004) and Thérèse mon amour (2008)’; Chapter 12: Claire Williams (University of Oxford), ‘‘Putting the Fish in the Stream’: The Intersection of Literature and Biography in Guidebooks to (Clarice Lispector’s) Rio and (Maria Ondina Braga’s) Braga’; Chapter 13: Adalgisa Giorgio (University of Bath), ‘Reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels with the Grain: The View of a Female Academic from Southern Italy’; Chapter 14: Suzan Bozkurt (Independent Scholar, UK), ‘Stepping out into Cyberspace: How Women Negotiate Digital Spaces in Politics, Economics and Culture’.