Québécoise

Not surprisingly, moreover, it was divided on gender lines, the Québécoise (women) reviewers for Le Journal de Montréal and CITÉ-FM radio alone giving the production rave reviews.[…]Finally, Marie Labrecque, in her (generally balanced) article about the “controversy” over the production, quotes a number of prominent (male) Québécois playwrights who agree that “la seule chose qui reste pareille, c’est le texte.”

Quebec children left home slightly earlier than their Maritime counterparts: the singulate mean age at marriage for Québécoise women was 25 compared to 26 among Nova Scotian women, while the singulate mean age at marriage for Québécois men was 27 compared to 29 for men in Nova Scotia.

However, this discourse is complicated because on the one hand, Sara creates a new space as she was not born in Québec, nor did she grow up there, but goes on to explain that she feels Québécoise and that she belongs there apparently sharing a collectivity with the Québécois, however, on the other hand, she talks about the Québécois people as a homogeneous group, as a single entity with one language and one culture even though her own position is heterogeneous and diverse.[…]At the same time, she self-identifies as all three identities: Franco-Ontarian, Québécoise, and French Canadian, simultaneously in this interaction.

If Self’s languages define her identity, and have made her ‘very Canadian,’ her French does not correspond to Canadian French as she discovers in Montreal, her Québécois heritage absent from her pronunciation:[…]it is precisely Self’s ‘French French’ that undermines her in public in Quebec, as the dignity of her claims to being Québécoise is attacked.