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.
"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. ... 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
"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."
