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François Cusset, author of the acclaimed book French Theory, investigates the queering of the French literary canon by American writers and scholars in this thought-provoking and free-minded journey across six centuries of literary classics and sexual polemics.
Cusset presents the foundations and rationale for American queer theory, the field of study established in the 1990s and promulgated by writers and scholars such as Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Warner (in the wake of Michel Foucault), which challenges a supposed "heteronormative" ideology in our culture. He provides an overview of their reinterpretation of the French literary canon from a queer perspective, then deliberately goes further, confronting that same canon with a lively form of general suspicion—seeking gender trouble and sexual ambiguities in the most unexpected corners of French literary classics, in which macho heroes turn out to be homosocial melancholics and the most seemingly submissive housewives are great vanguards of lesbian liberation.
Cusset's survey includes medieval and Renaissance literature, works from the Age of Enlightenment, nineteenth-century avant-gardists such as Charles Baudelaire and Honoré de Balzac, and twentieth-century modernists such as Marcel Proust and Jean Genet.
Bold in its themes and propositions, The Inverted Gaze (a translation of the book Queer Critics) is an extraordinary work about French literature and American queer politics by one of France's biggest intellectual stars.
François Cusset is a professor of American studies at the University of Paris. He is the author of numerous books including French Theory (2008).
David Homel is an award-winning translator and writer who lives in Montreal, Quebec.
"The playful capacity of camp rhetoric to both mock the status quo and appropriate it for its own queer imagination is crucial to Cusset’s analysis. He sees queer criticism as a break from the stuffy methodology of traditional literary criticism and instead champions the formation of an individual relationship with the text ... Even for the uninitiated, this book serves as a scintillating baptism by fire for all aspiring queer Francophiles making their first trek into the French literary canon." —Lambda Literary
"Imagine that a French theorist takes Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble—itself a landmark ‘translation’ (in the loose sense) of French feminist philosophy and theory—and re-translates it back into a French context, and you will begin to glean where François Cusset is coming from in The Inverted Gaze. Cusset is above all a cultural translator of the transatlantic sex and gender debates unfolding over the last thirty years. Homo, hetero, neuter, neutral, gay, queer, trans—all these Anglo-American terms and many more are newly refracted in Cusset’s brainy sexathon." —Emily Apter, New York University
"The Inverted Gaze is a guide to the more sexually daring exploration of the human condition as it unfolds in French literature through the ages." —Windy City News
François Cusset: François Cusset (French Theory) investigates the queering of the French literary canon by American writers and scholars in this daring and free-minded journey across six centuries of literary classics and sexual polemics. He presents the foundations and rationale for American queer theory, and provides an overview of the reinterpretation of the French (and Anglo) literary canon from a queer perspective.
David Homel: David Homel was born and raised in Chicago in 1952. He has been a journalist, editor, literary translator, and teacher, and has won numerous awards for translation, including the Governor General’s Award for Literature, Canada’s highest literary honor.
CONTENTS
Introduction: Holes in Glory
Perverse Readings
Disorienting the West
How to Take a Text
Inversion and Unfinishing
Anglofollies
ShaXXXpeare
From Mollies to Dandies
Drag Queens at Bouvines
Lancelot Uncovered
Heiress, Saint, Hermaphrodite
Renaissance and (De)tumescence
Montaigne Entwined
The Temptations of Dr. Rabelais
Trouble in the Clèves Family
The Libertines of Fuck-All
The Feints of Crébillon
The Nun Who Knew Too Much
The Bourgeoisie of the Inverted
Constant the Undecided
Lost Allusions
Baudelaire as Corolla
The Modern and its Muddle
A Brush with Gide
Proust Inside Herself
Genet De-penetrated
So As Not to Finish
Index