Cultures of Aggression. Towards a History of Gender-based Violence across the French Colonial Empire (1919-1939)
Profs. Anne Roekens and Stéphanie Wattier
Patrimoines, Transmissions, Héritages (PaTHs) at the University of Namur
‘Cultures of Aggression’ focuses on discourses on gender-based violence as a revealing object of historical analysis in colonial Senegal throughout the interwar period. It will highlight how attitudes towards gender-based violence crystallised and morphed through colonial practices, representations, and anxieties. In parallel, it will uncover the strategies deployed by individuals that stifled or generated empathy towards the victims. The project aims to generate imperial and colonial stories about those who have left fewer traces in the historical record. It will offer a new approach to writing the history of gender-based violence that centres on colonial dynamics and women. Building on an original corpus encompassing illustrated periodicals and juridical archives, it will contribute to the difficult yet important task of retracing the conditions under which gender-based violence reaches or fails to reach social awareness across time and place.
Angélique Ibáñez Aristondo is a Marie Curie C2W postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Namur. Her postdoctoral project examines the links between colonialism and the history of gender-based violence, currently focusing on Senegal across the interwar period. She is a member of the PaTHs research centre at the University of Namur with secondments at the IFAN (Dakar, Senegal) and CNRS (Paris, France).
Ibáñez Aristondo’s doctoral research retraced the impact of the First World War on perceptions of gender-based violence and sexual consent in French culture and literature (City University of New York, 2022). She has presented and published elements stemming from this research in international peer-reviewed journals, conferences, workshops, invited talks, and has been working towards publishing her first monograph in 2024. Ibáñez Aristondo has also been involved in a variety of collaborative projects. At the City University of New York, she launched and led a digital resource and workshops specialising in pedagogy in higher education. She currently facilitates an interdisciplinary working group on gender at the University of Namur.
Before joining UNamur, Angélique Ibáñez Aristondo worked as a teacher, freelance journalist, and news editor in New York, Paris, Lyon, and Philadelphia. And before all of that, she was a lower-income first-generation high school and college student who graduated in Philosophy and Media Studies while working as a waitress, salesperson, and more.
Peer-reviewed articles
Ibáñez Aristondo, Angélique. ‘Promettez-moi de me supprimer gentiment’. War Violence and Gendered Intimacy in Two Epistolary Novels of the First World War. French Studies, 77.2, Apr. 2023. DOI upon publication: https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knad037
Ibáñez Aristondo, Angélique. ‘“Si je t’étranglais ?” De la masculinité blessée au fantasme de féminicide chez Roland Dorgelès.’ Modern & Contemporary France, Online First, Aug. 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2022.2095364
Ibáñez Aristondo, Angélique, and Lucie Nizard. ‘Vanessa Springora et le fossoyage des mythes de la séduction “à la française”’. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 26(2), 2022, pp. 160-69. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2022.2038894
Ibáñez Aristondo, Angélique. ‘Seduction, Aggression, and Frenchness in La Vie Parisienne (1914-1918).’ French Cultural Studies, 33(1), 2022, pp. 40-58. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558211032362
Aristondo, Angélique. ‘Class-as-curator: Putting Images to Work in the Language Classroom.’ Interdisciplinary Humanities, Spring 2019, pp. 89-92.
Name | Angélique Aristondo |