Everywhere you look patriarchal society reduces women to a series of repeating symbols: serial girls.

On TV and in film, on the internet and in magazines, pop culture and ancient architecture, serial girls are all around us, moving in perfect sync—as dolls, as dancers, as statues. From Tiller Girls to Barbie dolls, Playboy bunnies to Pussy Riot, Martine Delvaux produces a provocative analysis of the many gendered assumptions that underlie modern culture. Delvaux draws on the works of Barthes, Foucault, de Beauvoir, Woolf, and more to argue that serial girls are not just the ubiquitous symbols of patriarchal domination but also offer the possibility of liberation.

Novelist Martine Delvaux was born in Quebec City and brought up in a francophone village in Ontario. She is the author of four novels, an essay on photographer Nan Goldin, and another on Serial Girls from Barbie to Pussy Riot (Fall 2016, Between the Lines). Her first book in English, Bitter Rose (translated by David Homel) was published by LLP to critical acclaim in 2015. Delvaux studied in the United States, taught in England, and now lives in Montreal, where she teaches women’s studies at Université du Québec à Montréal.

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Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood is the author of Rebelle et infidèle/The Body Bilingual. She has translated many works of theory and fiction into French and English, including Brossard’s Mauve Desert and She Would Be the First Sentence of My Next Novel.

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