Alexandra Pugh

Alexandra's research sits at the intersection of French Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. As Hamilton Junior Research Fellow, she is carrying out a research project on the representation of abortion in French literature and film since the year 2000. This project examines how abortion is put into and regulated through narrative, revealing the epistemic exclusion of certain perspectives on abortion across narrative forms. It interrogates the relationship between abortion rights and French national identity, shedding light on the position of abortion in the French Republican postcolonial imaginary. In this project, Alexandra analyses works by writers and filmmakers including Audrey Diwan, Suzanne Duval, Annie Ernaux, Line Papin, Colombe Schneck, Céline Sciamma, and Sandra Vizzavona.

She is also preparing her doctoral thesis for publication as a monograph. Her thesis examines the ‘queer-feminist aesthetics’ of the contemporary French writer and filmmaker, Virginie Despentes, and uses Despentes’s work as a prism to think through the relationship between feminist and queer, and politics and art, in the twenty-first century.