Joan Darc

Nathalie Quintane (trans. by Cynthia Hogue and Sylvain Gallais

Scuffing up the surface of history by scuffing up that of language, Nathalie Quintane manages to get at the myth of Joan of Arc from the inside, turning it from myth to immediate life and evoking the paradoxes and nuances that made Joan's life a double one—warrior on the surface and austere virgin underneath. Quintane works this into a metaphor for contemporary feminist self-performance that creates ways of subverting dominant narratives, transforming the image of woman-as-pawn to woman-as-power, with that power rooted in her capacity for self-determination.