Des femmes et des livres : littérature, sexualité et construction de soi
Women and books: literature, sexuality and self-construction

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this article is to reconsider the position of feminine readers in areas that are politically marked by strong ideas or customs that neglect the necessity of women’s needs and wants. It insists on the cleavage that separates professional reading, subject to the material and temporal constraints of research or teaching, and idle, selfless practice of a reader fully satisfied by a “first reading”. The creative or reading act, both a dynamic process and a reading event, is thus built around the notion of “experience”, a notion which perfectly summarizes the activity of the reading woman not only in an intimate context but in a socially and intellectually “liberated” context. As the reflection on the intellectualization of the act of feminine reading is nevertheless concentrated eminently on Western space, thus neglecting the evolution of the same phenomenon in the Eastern European space and in the Arab world, in the Maghreb, this study insists on the particularities of feminine reading in a French-speaking area particularly influenced by France.Reflections on the reading of women are multiplying in the French-speaking Arab space and in particular by the manifest speech of the authors of Maghrebi origin and French expression like Assia Djebar or Fatima Mernissi: “I believe that reading can save us, really.”At the same time “ersatz for sexual activities” (Frietz Nies) and sign of emancipation and difference, the feminine reading allows the “laying bare” (Assia Djebar) of the language that women appropriate to “tell” the world. Reading is therefore written, the reader inevitably becomes a writer in her seductive effort to “liberate herself”.Children, teenagers or adults, the readers of L’Amour, la fantasia or Dreams of women have a special propensity to read novels as a reflection of their lives. Self-correction and improvement test for the Koran child-reader, a gesture of delayed personal emancipation for the illiterate mother who asks the father to read to her aloud the Women’s Liberation of Qacem Amin, an escape attempt for Chama which reads Les Prairies d’Or in the toilets, an irresistible desire for metamorphosis by astrological manipulation or logophagic hysteria, reading has a strong symbolic and visionary value and prepares the “exorcisation” of feminine desires and passions, which become “transpersonal”.

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