Contenu du sommaire : Déméter et Koré

Since the 1970s, the issue of the maternal function and, more specifically, of the mother-daughter relationship, has been a focus of much attention among psychoanalysts and feminist theorists influenced by deconstruction, both in North America and Europe. Recently, two American psychoanalysts, Deanna Holtzman and Nancy Kulish ( A Story of Her Own: The Female Oedipus Complex Reexamined and Renamed, 2008), have turned to the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone in an attempt to explore what is often at play between a mother and her daughter (difficulty of separation or denial of the bond, passionate attachment or ambivalence, etc.), as evidenced by the respective clinics of the two analysts. In classical psychoanalysis, maternal issues are generally associated with pre-oedipal questions ; however, according to Holtzman and Kulish, these issues, which the story of Demeter and Persephone stages fabulously in a poetic manner, are precisely the equivalent of the process of impulse transformation that, since Freud, has generally been referred to as Oedipus and symbolic castration - terms that, according to the two American psychoanalysts, are used to describe first and foremost male drive destinies. From the myth of Demeter and Persephone, which decentralizes the figure of the father and emphasizes other aspects of what is involved in impulse transformation, Holtzman and Kulish therefore suggest a re-examination of the question of the law, generally associated with Oedipus, symbolic castration and the entry into language, in other words, a reassessment of the symbolic. In order to make Holtzman and Kulish's work better known in the French-speaking world, we have decided to translate a chapter from their book into French for this Cahiers du genre issue on the re-readings of the myth of Demeter and Persephone.

Ursula Le Guin's reinvention of mythological and epic narratives (e.g. Lavinia, 2008) is an inspiration for ecofeminist, queer, antipatriarchal and anarchist thought and fiction. After a review of the ancient figurations of Demeter and Kore, this article explores how they infuse Her Silent Daughter (1994), a mythological fantasy poem, and the psycho-myth Kore 87. A Child Bride (1996). The mother/daughter bond and their relationship to the world are plot drivers in these speculative fiction works, which use pathetic satire to denounce both economic and patriarchal violence. Such text artivism also comes as a disruption of the academic/popular, fiction/realism, and literature/anthropology binarisms.

Considering both the insights and pitfalls of a psychoanalytic approach to myths, this article examines contemporary interpretations of the myth of Demeter and Persephone that link it to anorexia nervosa, a potentially fatal psychosomatic disorder characterized by the refusal to eat and often associated with the discomfort of gender bias, demeaning images of femininity, and the quest for agency in a patriarchal society – issues that many versions of the myth also raise. While the usefulness of mythical references for practitioners and patients is up for discussion, relating ancient goddesses to modern eating disorders opens up interdisciplinary, feminist and intersectional perspectives on the ancient narrative and informs debates about its reception, in which modern poetry about Demeter and Persephone is also involved.

This article aims to re-examine the Demeter-Kore myth at the dawn of the “Grand Siècle” in France and to understand its various rewritings through the revival of the powerful link between the realm of plants, the subterranean and the female body. We look at Demeter, the figure of the nurturing woman-mother, deity of the harvest, and her daughter, Kore, personification of the sowing/harvesting cycle, symbol of plant metamorphosis, through classical painting. We observe that misogyny and the moralizing forces in society reappropriate the ancient myth by keeping only certain aspects of its celebration: the allegory of the harvest or, on the contrary, the woman in the underworld and death. We will therefore question this setback and the consequences of a resurgence of pagan cults in Christian society.

The myth of Demeter and Persephone has been studied in numerous publications in different fields. After being the subject of a variety of curious interpretations since antiquity (Calame 2000), it is now open to new versions, as evidenced by Chloé Delaume's  Les Sorcières de la République ( The Witches of the Republic), published by Éditions du Seuil, in 2016. This feminist and political dystopia shows the inexhaustible legacy of the myth “which can only be read in the particular version that brings it to its addressee (Calame 2000/2001). In this article, we will show how Delaume appropriates the myth of Demeter and Persephone. For this, she transposes the maternal-filial relationship, bringing to life a deployment of metaphorical relations, in the context of climate resistance and the patriarchal system, two burning current issues.

The author understands the myth of Demeter and Persephone as an unconscious representation of the primordial mother-daughter incest and attempts to demonstrate how this homosexual attachment is a conceptual blind spot for traditional psychoanalysis, which is mired in paternal dogmas and is dominated by the heterosexual drama of Oedipus the King. In doing so, they revisit the article « The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman », highlighting Freud's blind spots and the ideological assumptions of his time, which led him to repress the homoerotic component of the Oedipus complex, which the father of psychoanalysis himself had identified.

While in Greece Demeter is a nurturing mother, in Aotearoa New Zealand Papatūānuku is not only the source of life, but also the mother of all entities that make up and inhabit the universe. In Māori cosmogony, each entity is connected to the others in a genealogical continuity with the primordial ancestors: Papatūānuku (Mother Earth), Ranginui (Father Sky) and their children, to whom so much of the contemporary māori feminist and environmentalist discourses refer to. This article looks at feminist re-readings of Māori cosmogony to examine the places and functions of Mother Earth and her daughters, the wāhine, in a country affected by British colonisation. In doing so, it interrogates gender issues in Māori society through the ages.