Lost in Translation? Russian Media Portrayals and Laypersons’ Interpretations of Angelina Jolie’s Breast Cancer Discourse

In May 2013, Angelina Jolie revealed that because she had a family history of breast and ovarian cancer and carried a rare BRCA gene mutation, she had undergone a preventive double mastectomy. Media coverage has been extensive around the world, including in Russia, not an English-language country, where all global news is inevitably filtered by translation. After examining the reactions of Russian mass media and members of the public to Jolie’s disclosure, I consider what transformations have occurred with Jolie’s message in the process of cross-cultural transfer. I explore the mass media portrayal of Jolie’s announcement, laypersons’ immediate and prolonged reactions, and the reflections of patients involved directly in the field of hereditary breast cancer. To my knowledge, this multifaceted and bilingual project is the first conceptualization of Jolie’s story as it has been translated in a different sociocultural environment. I start with examination of offline and online publications that appeared in Russia within two months after Jolie’s announcement. In this part of my analysis, I conceptualize the representation of Jolie’s case in Russian mass media and grasp what sociocultural waves were generated by this case among general lay audiences. Another part of my study contains the results of qualitative in-depth interviews. Eight women with a family history of hereditary breast cancer were recruited to participate in the research. The findings represent Jolie’s case through the eyes of Russian women with the same gene mutation as Jolie. Consolidating my findings, I argue that Jolie’s announcement was misinterpreted and misrepresented by Russian mass media, as well as misunderstood by a considerable part of the media audience. Jolie’s perspective on hereditary breast cancer mostly remained unheard among members of the Russian public. I make suggestions about the reasons for such a phenomenon, and demonstrate how Jolie’s case is implicated in politics, economics, and the culture of contemporary Russia.

L'évolution des voix/voies de femmes dans leurs écrits sur l'Église aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles

Feminist movements have allowed many female authors to become decisive and influential figures in literary history by studying their experiences, voices and forms of resistance. This thesis, however, focuses specifically on religious women, those seeking divine comfort outside the confines of institutional laws, or those who, out of protest, are caught in the middle. Founded on historical and feminist perspectives, this study examines the heterodox resistance of six French women living within or outside of Church boundaries during the 17th and 18th centuries: two eras that are particularly significant for women’s progress and modernity. This work strives to demonstrate how these women, doubly subjected to Church discourse and that of society, managed to live out their vocation (female and Christian) and make social, cultural and religious statements that contributed to changing the place of women in society. It aims to grasp the similarities and differences between the actions and ideas of women belonging to both the religious and secular spheres. Regardless of the century, the space and their background, women resist to masculine, patriarchal, ecclesial, political and social mediation and institutions. In locating examples of how they oppose the practices, rules and constraints that are imposed upon them, as well as of their exclusion from the socio-political space, this thesis also seeks to identify epistemological changes that mark the transition from the 17th to the 18th century. This thesis firstly outlines the necessary feminist theory upon which the project is based before identifying the evolution of women’s positions within the socio-ideological and political framework in which they lived. The questions of confession and spiritual direction are of particular interest since they serve as prime examples of masculine mediation and its issues and consequences – most notably the control of the female body and mind. The illustration of bodily metamorphoses bear testament to ideological changes, cultural awareness and female subjectivity, just as the scriptural inscriptions of unorthodox ideas and writing. The female body, both object and subject of the quest for individual and collective liberties, attests, in this way, to the movement towards Enlightenment values of freedom and justice.

Malséance : la mort et l'image dans le (méta)théâtre de Samuel Beckett et de Jean Genet

Both ludic and macabre, the theatrical works of Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet are a paradox to behold. Indeed, as this thesis seeks to illustrate, despite their vastly differing aesthetics, at the core of each playwright’s stage productions is a tension between the characters’ yearning for silence and invisibility, and the continual creation of an often humorous, chaotic, exaggerated or theatrical image that depicts this very longing. Seeking an impossible intersection between their image and their death, they are trapped in a double bind that guarantees aesthetic failure. In order to grasp the close, yet delicate, relationship between the image of death and the death of the image, as presented in the plays of Beckett and Genet, we will explore how the characters’ creative processes deflate the very images — both visual and auditory — that they create. More specifically, we will examine how mimesis both liberates and confines the characters; while the symbolic realm provides the only means of self-representation, it is also a source of profound alienation and powerlessness, for it never adequately conveys meaning. Thus, body, gesture, language and voice are each the site of simultaneous and ceaseless reappearance and disappearance, for which death remains the only (aporetic) cure. Struggling against theatrical form, which demands the actors’ and the audience’s physical presence, both playwrights make shrewd use of metatheatre to slowly empty the stage and thereby suggest the impending, yet impossible, erasure of their characters.