Marie-Lise Drapeau-Bisson

Marie-Lise Drapeau-Bisson (she/her) is a sociologist whose work explores how political books – reading them, evaluating them, commemorating them, shape our political imagination. Currently a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellow at the Feminist Institute for Social Transformation (FIST), Marie-Lise works with Ann Cvetkovich on a project titled “Books and Unusual Archives: An Analysis of Intimate Feminist Memory Work in Québec”. Her project relies on the premise that books are rich movement archival material and that personal collections of books housed in feminists’ dusty bookshelves, stuffed closets and damp basements form unusual archives of feminist history – what Cvetkovich has called archives of feelings. Using ethnographic methods like participant observation, interview and archival work, Marie-Lise has taken on the analysis of feminists’ alternative ways of remembering to understand how activists of different generations relate to foundational texts, and how they use the curation of personal collections of books to animate their political work.

This project extends her doctoral research (University of Toronto, supervisor: Judith Taylor), which traced the cultural trajectory of the novel L’Euguélionne, a feminist novel ironically best-known for being forgotten. Following the novel’s reception and commemoration through newspapers and magazines, literary pieces and interviews, Marie-Lise unpacked the derogatory discourse in the critical appraisal of feminist art, explored commemoration beyond plaques and statues through cultural reception, and analyzed the role of friendship in feminist memory work.

To learn more about Marie-Lise’s work and research interests, you can visit her website and consult her list of publications below.

Publications:

1. Drapeau-Bisson, Marie-Lise (Forthcoming) “Movement Renewal and Attachments to the Past: The Commemorative Reception of the Feminist Novel L’Euguélionne in Québec” in Women Studies Quarterly.
2. Drapeau-Bisson, Marie-Lise (Forthcoming) “Critical appraisal and masculine authority: The boys club’s derogatory method of reading Canadian feminist speculative fiction” in Cultural Sociology.
3. Drapeau-Bisson, Marie-Lise (2019) “Beyond Green and Orange: Alliance for Choice – Derry’s mobilisation for the Decriminalisation of Abortion” in Irish Political Studies, 35(1): 25.
4. Drapeau-Bisson, Marie-Lise, Francis Dupuis-Déri and Marcos Ancelovici (2014) “‘La grève est étudiante, la lute est populaire!’ Manifestations de casseroles et assembles de quartier” in Un Printemps rouge et noir, regards croisés sur le grève étudiante de 2012, edited by Marcos Ancelovici and Francis Duipuis-Déri, Montréal: Écosociété.