Annie Leclerc

Leclerc, Annie. Author of Parole de femme (1974), an influential text of the French feminist movement of the 1970s, celebrating the female body in lyrical terms. The text's assumption of female specificity and acceptance of traditionally female specificity and acceptance of traditionally female domestic tasks made it controversial, though Leclerc's main purpose was to revalue women's experience. Arguing that women have historically been closer to their bodies than men, she calls on women in ‘La Lettre d'amour’ (in La Venue à l'écriture, 1977) to write from their bodies. After Épousailles (1976) and Au feu du jour (1979), affirming women's special relationship to life forces, Hommes et femmes (1985) focuses on the common language of love between men and women; sexual difference is still strongly expressed but as a dialectic rather than as a biological given. A collection of short stories, Le Mal de mère (1986), was followed by Origines (1988), a text addressed directly to Rousseau and relating her lifetime passion for his work (it also evokes her marriage to Nicos Poulantzas). At the same time it is an account of her own relationship with writing. Clés (1989) is a short text exploring the power of words through the Bluebeard myth. All Leclerc's writing is highly poetic and is closely bound up with her own experience.

[Elizabeth Fallaize]