The papers published in this volume were first given at a one-day international conference, held at the Université Jean Moulin-Lyon3 on December 12, 2014. It was hosted jointly by the Société Conradienne Française and the Institute for Transtextual and Transcultural Studies (I.E.T.T., a Lyon 3 research center) and was organized as a follow-up to the 2006 conference in Limoges entitled: "'Feminity, a privilege – not feminism, an attitude': the ‘feminine’ in Joseph Conrad’s fiction: from ideology to a poetics of heterogeneity".

Building on the ideas addressed during this conference, which included notions of stereotypes and the way in which Conradian fiction brings to light new gender representations and explores the link between patriarchy and imperialism, the Lyon conference invited participants to further investigate the relationship between the feminine, ideology, politics and aesthetics, examining the nature of the borders that separate or link these different territories, as well as the border between the masculine and the feminine.