CURA Colloquium: Rewriting Religion, Reinventing Gender in Wittig’s Les Guérillères
The Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs (CURA), an affiliated regional studies center of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, hosted a talk with Kelly Keenan, PhD student in French Literature at Boston University, on November 22, 2019 as part of their 2019-2020 Colloquium on Religion and World Affairs.
Keenan gave a talk entitled “Rewriting Religion, Reinventing Gender in Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères,” which explored the appropriated and reinvented mythology that Monique Wittig weaves throughout her 1969 novel/manifesto, Les Guérillères.
In her talk, Keenan argued that through her rewriting of both sacred and societal myths, Wittig offers a larger critique of the societal institutions that instill and enforce women’s oppression.
CURA hosts a yearly interdisciplinary Colloquium on Religion and World Affairs, in cooperation with the BU School of Theology. The Colloquium meets bimonthly throughout the academic year to discuss working papers on the chosen theme, either written by CURA Fellows or invited scholars from outside BU. CURA Fellows are selected from across the BU community during a competitive application period every spring. The Colloquium sessions are open to the general public, but all attendees are expected to read the papers in advance. The sessions focus on providing feedback and suggestions to the authors. Authors do not make a formal presentation but are able to engage with the audience and answer questions after the papers are discussed.
The theme for the 2019-2020 colloquium is “Religion and Identity.” The working papers will explore the ways in which religion creates, shapes, and interacts with individual and social identities. We welcome work that explores specifically religious identity as race, gender, sexuality, and nationality.