The Inverted Gaze: Queering the French Literary Classics in America

(Paperback)

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In a thought-provoking and free-minded journey across six centuries of literary classics and sexual polemics, Francois Cusset investigates the queering of the French literary canon by American writers and scholars. In The Inverted Gaze, Cusset presents the foundations and rationale for queer theory, the field of study - established in the 1990s and promulgated by the likes of Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Warner (in the wake of Michel Foucault) - which challenges a supposed 'heteronormative' ideology in Western culture.

Reviews

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 Franois 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

Author Bio

Franois Cusset: Franois 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.