Book Review: From menstruation to the menopause: The female fertility cycle in contemporary women’s writing in French

of the impact of sexual misconduct in our culture and how it influences all people. They emphasize the powerful and positive impact that #MeToo has had on American culture by revealing widespread incidents of sexual misconduct, and they don’t fall into the trap of seeing all men as perpetrators and all women as victims. Wexler and Sweet maintain a helpful balance as they navigate these complex and highly charged issues. They help us understand that sexual misconduct covers a whole spectrum of behaviors and demonstrate that there are many different contexts that need to be considered. They point out there are a number of issues that make supportive therapy challenging, including topics such as how social media tends to tell only one side of the story and how men might have difficulty finding their voice in the movement. The second part of the book builds on the first, offering positive strategies for clinicians and educators. In it, the authors address important issues that most clinicians and educators face, including two very sensitive and helpful chapters on working with men as well as a chapter on empowering women. There is a chapter on sexual misconduct on campus that offers guidance for stopping the spread of sexist behavior and one on addressing sexual harassment in the workplace and how to recognize and address toxic attitudes and behaviors. Two final chapters demonstrate the value of having two highly qualified clinicians, one male and one female, as co-authors of the book. The chapter on working with couples is extremely helpful in applying the wisdom offered in the earlier chapters to the challenges faced by men and women in intimate relationships. It helps everyone to bridge the potential gender gap that might cause divisiveness in our world. In the last chapter, creating a culture of alliance, the co-authors remind us that we are all in this together. They offer specific steps about how all people can take creative and effective action on #MeToo-informed issues. This book is a great gift and a very helpful resource for everyone, professional counselors and educators, as well as interested men and women who care about gender equality and healing.

the #MeToo movement. They give a "big picture" overview of the impact of sexual misconduct in our culture and how it influences all people. They emphasize the powerful and positive impact that #MeToo has had on American culture by revealing widespread incidents of sexual misconduct, and they don't fall into the trap of seeing all men as perpetrators and all women as victims.
Wexler and Sweet maintain a helpful balance as they navigate these complex and highly charged issues. They help us understand that sexual misconduct covers a whole spectrum of behaviors and demonstrate that there are many different contexts that need to be considered. They point out there are a number of issues that make supportive therapy challenging, including topics such as how social media tends to tell only one side of the story and how men might have difficulty finding their voice in the movement.
The second part of the book builds on the first, offering positive strategies for clinicians and educators. In it, the authors address important issues that most clinicians and educators face, including two very sensitive and helpful chapters on working with men as well as a chapter on empowering women. There is a chapter on sexual misconduct on campus that offers guidance for stopping the spread of sexist behavior and one on addressing sexual harassment in the workplace and how to recognize and address toxic attitudes and behaviors.
Two final chapters demonstrate the value of having two highly qualified clinicians, one male and one female, as co-authors of the book. The chapter on working with couples is extremely helpful in applying the wisdom offered in the earlier chapters to the challenges faced by men and women in intimate relationships. It helps everyone to bridge the potential gender gap that might cause divisiveness in our world. In the last chapter, creating a culture of alliance, the co-authors remind us that we are all in this together. They offer specific steps about how all people can take creative and effective action on #MeToo-informed issues.
This book is a great gift and a very helpful resource for everyone, professional counselors and educators, as well as interested men and women who care about gender equality and healing. In this rich study, Maria Tomlinson tracks the representation of the reproductive cycle in the works of contemporary women authors writing in French from Algeria, Mauritius, and France. Impressive in its scope, the volume offers us a variety of examples from wellestablished authors such as Nina Bouraoui, Maïssa Bey, Virginie Despentes, and Marie Cardinal, and allows us to discover the work of authors who have not consistently had the privilege of the academic spotlight such as Shenaz Patel, Leïla Marouane, and Malika Mokeddem, to name but a few. Through a lucidly articulated intersectional approach, the book moves the needle from a metropolitan France-centric point of view to the Francophone world, thus ensuring that the volume eschews a hierarchical, neocolonial structure. The intersectional and comparative aspects are foregrounded through the comprehensive introduction Tomlinson offers wherein she brings to the fore the principal causes that affect women's reproductive cycle and the ways in which it is weaponized by patriarchal forces to subjugate women. Tomlinson establishes her critical framework in the first chapter which addresses attitudes toward the reproductive cycle from the perspective of second-wave feminists and representative figures such as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous which tended to present the female bodily experience as "universal" without attending to specificities such as race, social class, and religion. This is an imbalance Tomlinson wishes to redress by taking an intersectional approach throughout and bringing in critical voices such as Audre Lorde and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. While underlining the medicalization of the reproductive cycle in the mostly secular Western world as filtered through the French example and raising awareness about the roles religion and ethnicity play in shaping attitudes in Algeria and Mauritius, Tomlinson highlights that despite the existence of different models of thought and belief, a unifying conclusion can be drawn: blood, both the symbol and in many ways, the essence of a women's reproductive powers, is seen as abject, unhygienic, and impure across the Francophone world. Tomlinson furthermore recognizes that the reproductive cycle, from its beginning to its perceived end, often unfolds under the aegis of trauma.

ORCID iD
The structure of the book is particularly impressive with Tomlinson proving to be an exceptionally thorough scholar as she runs her readers through the female reproductive cycle in each selected country with pertinent and often complex examples of menstruation, childbirth, and menopause. With ease and coherence, she offers us a comprehensive overview while never falling into didacticism. The volume further gestures towards contemporary developments in their multimedial declensions, with a particular focus on social media and the representation of menstruation. It brings to the fore an intensifying interest in the contemporary era in not only publicizing the reproductive cycle and removing the cone of shame under which it is often relegated, but also in community building around these embodied thematics. Tomlinson's monograph imposes itself as an invaluable resource not only to specialized scholars in the areas of French studies and reproductive studies, but to a larger academic audience interested in the ways in which we approach female corporeality and temporality in different cultures.

Author Biography
Adina Stroia is an early career researcher in the field of women's life writing and visual culture. Currently, she is a lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at Newcastle University. Her research focuses on psychoanalysis, thanatography, aging, ethics of care, lesbian studies, and visual studies.