This panel explores how women writers and female characters in French and francophone literature resist, reconfigure, and expose gendered hierarchies of power embedded within social, political, and cultural “ruling classes.” In keeping with this year’s conference theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” the session examines how literary texts interrogate the mechanisms through which authority, patriarchal, colonial, aristocratic, bourgeois, or religious, is contested.

From the salons and courts of early modern France to postcolonial and diasporic contexts, women’s resistance often takes subtle, coded, or paradoxical forms. Acts of refusal, silence, strategic compliance, or narrative self-fashioning challenge dominant structures that conflate obedience with virtue and desire with submission. By foregrounding women’s negotiation of consent, agency, and speech, this panel invites reflection on how literature renders visible the fragility of supposedly stable power systems.

Papers engaging a wide chronological and geographical range, from canonical works to contemporary francophone texts from Africa, the Caribbean, Québec, and beyond are welcome.

Rather than positioning women solely as victims of hierarchy, this session aims to emphasize literary representations of resistance and transformation. By analyzing how women contest the norms that structure “ruling classes,” the panel contributes to broader conversations about how culture contributes to destabilizing systems of power, and how literature imagines alternative forms of authority and agency.