La rencontre d’une femme et d’un ours : Autour du « baiser » de Croire aux fauves

Abstract

In her personal account of a violent face-to-face with a brown bear in Siberia, Nastassja Martin reflects on how this experience has transformed her sense of self. This analysis of Croire aux fauves (2019) explores how it connects to stories of encounters between humans and bears that have often been framed either as sexual or romantic when it came to women, or as heroic and deadly battles when it came to men. The article stresses that Martin’s narrator goes off-script when it comes to gendered expectations, and reinvents herself as a consequence of the shattering of her bodily and psychological boundaries – as well as of the boundaries between species.