Synopses & Reviews
More than any other area of late-twentieth-century thinking, gender theory and its avatars have been to a large extent a Franco-American invention. In this book, a leading Franco-American scholar traces differences and intersections in the development of gender and queer theories on both sides of the Atlantic. Looking at these theories through lenses that are both "American" and "French," thus simultaneously retrospective and anticipatory, she tries to account for their alleged exhaustion and currency on the two sides of the Atlantic.
The book is divided into four parts. In the first, the author examines two specifically "American" features of gender theories since their earliest formulations: on the one hand, an emphasis on the theatricality of gender (from John Money's early characterization of gender as "role playing" to Judith Butler's appropriation of Esther Newton's work on drag queens); on the other, the early adoption of a "queer" perspective on gender issues.
In the second part, the author reflects on a shift in the rhetoric concerning sexual minorities and politics that is
prevalent today. Noting a shift from efforts by oppressed or marginalized segments of the population to make themselves "heard" to an emphasis on rendering themselves "visible," she demonstrates the formative role of the American civil rights movement in this new drive to visibility.
The third part deals with the travels back and forth across the Atlantic of "sexual difference," ever since its elevation to the status of quasi-concept by psychoanalysis. Tracing the "queering" of sexual difference, the author reflects on both the modalities and the effects of this development.
The last section addresses the vexing relationship between Western feminism and capitalism. Without trying either to commend or to decry this relationship, the author shows its long-lasting political and cultural effects on current feminist and postfeminist struggles and discourses. To that end, she focuses on one of the intense debates within feminist and postfeminist circles, the controversy over prostitution.
Review
"The scholarship of the book is a treat, as is the care with which Berger attends to distinctions or crafts a sentence."-E.S. Burt, University of California, Irvine
Synopsis
At a time when gender and queer theories appear to its American proponents to have exhausted themselves, they are hailed in France as something "new". Yet, more than any area of late 20th-century thinking, gender theory and its avatars have been to a large extent a Franco-American invention. A Franco-American scholar, the author uses this particular temporal and intellectual juncture to look again at a certain history and theory of "gender" and "sexuality."
The book is divided into three parts. The first part deals with one of the thorniest conundrums of late 20th-century feminist theory and politics, namely, the question of the "veil". It includes Berger's by now classical essay on the "Islamic Veil" and the politics of specularity. The second part focuses on the intersection between gender, language and national politics and proposes original rereadings of Benedict Anderson's studies of the relationship between languages and nations. The last and most important part looks at gender and queer theories through lenses that are simultaneously retrospective and anticipatory, "American" and "French", to try and account for the terms of both their "exhaustion" and their "currency" on one side and the other of the Atlantic. In this last section, the book offers important theoretical and historical insights into what the author sees as two specifically "American" features of these theories since their earliest formulations: on the one hand, an emphasis on the theatricality of gender, [from John Money's early emphasis on gender as "role playing" to Judith Butler's appropriation of Esther Newton's work on drag queens]; on the other, the adoption from the start of a "queer" perspective on gender issues.
About the Author
Anne Emmanuelle Berger is currently professor of French Literature and Gender Studies at the Universite Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis, where she heads the Centre d'etudes feminines et d'etudes de genre. She is also director of a new national Institute for Gender Studies (Institut du Genre), backed by the CNRS and 32 French institutions for higher education. Her most recent publications include Demenageries: Thinking (of) Animals After Derrida.
Catherine Porter is Professor Emerita, SUNY College at Cortland; a former president of the Modern Language Association; and a renowned translator of French philosophy and theory.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Parabasis (Before the Act)
2. Queens and Queers: The Theater of Gender in "America"
3. Paradoxes of Visibility in / and Contemporary Identity Politics
4. The Ends of an Idiom, or Sexual Difference in Translation
5. Roxana's Legacy: Feminism and Capitalism in the West
Notes
Works Cited
Index