- Rosi Braidotti's nomadic subjectivity as a pertinent notion to describe the PF's quest for new forms of belonging based on participation in political action, acts of female solidarity, writing, etc.

- The connection established between the themes of ballet and insurrection as sharing the category of movement. In this sense, the PF is seen as the generator of movement, which pushes to action the protagonist and then a larger group of people.

- The importance of language as bearing fundamental evidence of how subjectivities are constructed (see the passage on the "quand même / after all"). 

This character compares herself to a broken object with no use, an object that needs to be repaired in order to regain its social function. Despite the external pressure of family and the health system, PF seems to reject such constraints: she rejects both imposed models of femininity and the idea of origins/belonging. We commented that while her notes in the first part of the novel deconstruct the stereotypical woman, concrete actions in the second one might suggest the attempt to construct a possible new female identity (from the passivity of patriarchal oppression to the empowerment of female solidarity in the encounter between Volatirine and PF). The epigraph drawn from Mujeres Creando certainly goes in that direction. This progression within the novel can be read in parallel with the ambitions of contemporary feminism, which not only unmasks patriarchal dynamics, but also aspires to forge a female identity conceived as only one facet of more complex subjectivities and distant from the essentialist paradigm of old-school feminism. 

In order to better grasp the idea of a work-in-progress female subjectivity, I proposed some excerpts from the volume Nomadic Subjects, by Rosi Braidotti (see slides in the Drive). We will start from here next week.

In particular, we focused on the linguistic strategies used by the protagonist to speak of / refer to sexual violence (italics, incomplete sentences). We interpreted these strategies in relation to the intended audience of the fictional diary (the protagonist's friend, Emile) and reflected more in general on the consequences of putting into words a traumatic experience, i.e., what happens to sexual violence when it is articulated into a discourse or narrative, how women cope with the status of victims, what rhetorical strategies are used to trivialize their experience, etc.  

We highlighted the constant references to ballet as a form of self-appropriation that allows the (female, in this case) subject to be in control of her body; for the protagonist, ballet - and the fact that she ends up quitting it - becomes the most relevant (and almost symbolic) evidence of her status of alienation with regard to her own body.

We then proceeded to introduce the novel, namely its title, which establishes a direct link to 19th-century anarchism, particularly what happened during the Haymarket affair in Chicago (1886). 

After that, we performed the close reading of the first two paragraphs of the novel, which immediately highlight the centrality of the body (key theme especially in view of a general discourse on how the book contributes to feminist debate) and display coping mechanisms that will recur in the protagonist's strategies to process different forms of trauma.

We also read some reactions to the César Awards events, namely actress Adèle Haenel's decision to leave the Salle Pleyel and Virginie Despentes' article published on the newspaper Libération shortly after the ceremony (all excerpts are available in the Slides, with the corresponding links for the full videos / texts).