Mercédès Baillargeon

Biography

Mercédès Baillargeon is associate professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA. During her USIAS Fellowship, she will be hosted by Professor Anthony Mangeon in the research unit Literary Configurations (CL) at the University of Strasbourg.

Professor Baillargeon’s research focuses on two main areas: contemporary women's writing, feminism, gender and sexuality studies, and the intersection of public and private. She is also interested in Québec cinema, especially its relationship to national and personal identity. She teaches courses related to gender and sexuality, nationalism, identity, and ethnicity, Francophone North America and Québec literature, politics and film, youth and counterculture as well as all-level of French language.

Dr. Baillargeon is the author of Le Personnel est politique: médias, esthétique et politique de l'autofiction chez Christine Angot, Chloé Delaume et Nelly Arcan (Purdue UP, 2019). She has co-edited special issues of the journals Contemporary French Civilization (2019) and Nouvelles Vues: revue sur les pratiques, les théories et l'histoire du cinéma au Québec (2022), as well as a collection of essays on third-wave feminism in Québec entitled Remous, ressacs et dérivations autour de la troisième vague féministe (2011). Her work has also appeared in the journals Québec Studies, Women in French, and Rocky Mountain Review, among others.

She has co-organized several conferences and the virtual speaker series, The Future of French and Francophone Studies in 2020-2021. She is currently an active member of the research group EPIC (Esthétique et politique de l’image cinématographique) and serves on the editorial board for the journals Québec Studies and Voix et Images.

A native of Montréal, Canada, she came to the United States to complete her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to joining the University of Massachusetts Lowell, she was associate professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Maryland from 2014 to 2022.

Fellowship 2024

Dates - 01/12/2024-31/01/2026

Project summary

WOMEN’S WRITING AND SELF-DISCLOSURE IN FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES, 1995-2015

This project takes as a starting point the explosion of first-person narratives penned by women in France and the U.S. It contends that despite their apparent similarity, autofiction in France and the memoir in the U.S. stem from distinct literary traditions, each with unique objectives and narrative approaches. By transcending traditional boundaries between French and American literature, scholarly and popular discourse, and testimony and fiction, this project situates itself within the intersection of feminism, literary politics, and self-disclosure.

Employing an interdisciplinary methodology that incorporates literary analysis, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, political economy theories, feminism, and socio-cultural criticism, this project explores the philosophical, social, and cultural underpinnings of women’s autofiction in France and memoir in the U.S. between 1995-2015. Previous scholarship has primarily focused on delineating the characteristics of autobiography and autofiction, as well as analyzing the poetics and politics of women's first-person narratives. This project augments existing research by adopting a comparative lens, elucidating the nuanced differences in conceptions of selfhood, female subjectivity, and citizenship between the two literary traditions.

Central to this study is an examination of how experiences of trauma influence female self-disclosure and shape societal norms and politics. Unlike recent studies that attribute the crisis of the subject to postmodernity, this project underscores the role of socio-cultural and historical factors in shaping understandings of subjecthood and gendered subjectivity in the U.S. and France. It situates the reception of autofiction and memoir within the broader landscape of contemporary literary production, proposing a semiotic analysis of textual modalities used to represent the female subject.

Through a comparative analysis of French and American writers, this project illuminates how these narratives intersect with broader societal dialogues and contribute to the evolution of feminist discourse. It acknowledges the pivotal role of these writers in challenging traditional gender roles and setting the stage for movements like #metoo. Against the backdrop of post-feminism and neoliberal feminism, their literary endeavours emerge as catalysts for social change, laying the groundwork for a reimagining of female identity and agency.