Description
During the interwar years in France, modernist literature challenged norms around sex and sexuality through daring portrayals of homosexuality and queerness. The same moment, however, witnessed the crystallization of the Western gender binary and its stark lines of division between male and female. Bringing together trans theory with French literary studies, Mat Fournier offers a new understanding of how the gender binary emerged in the modernist era.
Dysphoric Modernism considers gender deviance in works by a broad range of French authors, both writers who are canonical for queer theory, such as Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, Jean Genet, and Colette, and lesser-known figures, including Rene Crevel, Raymond Radiguet, Maurice Sachs, and Maurice Rostand. Its trans readings track the dysphoria inherent to modern gender and the many ways these texts both disrupt and reinforce it. Examining the complex entanglements of gender and sexuality with the colonial project, Fournier argues that modernist writers' representations of sexual dissidence came at the cost of their enforcement of racial and gendered discrimination. A groundbreaking transgender analysis of French modernist literature, this book also demonstrates the significance of the concept of dysphoria for a number of fields.
About the Author
Mat Fournier is an associate professor of French at Ithaca College.
Reviews
Dysphoric Modernism is a brilliant intervention into trans, queer, and modernist studies. By tracing the emergence of the "gender assemblage," to which everyone relates dysphorically, Mat Fournier presents a Deleuzoguattarian argument for sexuality's and gender's interrelatedness, revealing that queer and trans theorists still have much to say to one another. -- Chris Coffman, author of Queer Traversals: Psychoanalytic Queer and Trans Theories
Proust is at the heart of Dysphoric Modernism, along with a crowd of other well-known and less well-known contemporaries who together produce a collective, shimmering cloud of gender dysphoria, a term Fournier compellingly repurposes so that we can perceive in this modernist moment a "gender assemblage" that is "bursting" or "leaking," and thereby revealing gender's implication in all we do and are. -- Michael Lucey, author of What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk
The weirdness of modern gender lies at the heart of Mat Fournier's groundbreaking book, which traces how the gender binary emerged in the early twentieth century. Dysphoric Modernism conjures the magic of queerness and reminds us that its power can't be extinguished even in the darkest of times. -- Teagan Bradway, author of Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading
Book Information
ISBN 9780231209533
Author Mat Fournier
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
Dysphoric Modernism considers gender deviance in works by a broad range of French authors, both writers who are canonical for queer theory, such as Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, Jean Genet, and Colette, and lesser-known figures, including Rene Crevel, Raymond Radiguet, Maurice Sachs, and Maurice Rostand. Its trans readings track the dysphoria inherent to modern gender and the many ways these texts both disrupt and reinforce it. Examining the complex entanglements of gender and sexuality with the colonial project, Fournier argues that modernist writers' representations of sexual dissidence came at the cost of their enforcement of racial and gendered discrimination. A groundbreaking transgender analysis of French modernist literature, this book also demonstrates the significance of the concept of dysphoria for a number of fields.
About the Author
Mat Fournier is an associate professor of French at Ithaca College.
Reviews
Dysphoric Modernism is a brilliant intervention into trans, queer, and modernist studies. By tracing the emergence of the "gender assemblage," to which everyone relates dysphorically, Mat Fournier presents a Deleuzoguattarian argument for sexuality's and gender's interrelatedness, revealing that queer and trans theorists still have much to say to one another. -- Chris Coffman, author of Queer Traversals: Psychoanalytic Queer and Trans Theories
Proust is at the heart of Dysphoric Modernism, along with a crowd of other well-known and less well-known contemporaries who together produce a collective, shimmering cloud of gender dysphoria, a term Fournier compellingly repurposes so that we can perceive in this modernist moment a "gender assemblage" that is "bursting" or "leaking," and thereby revealing gender's implication in all we do and are. -- Michael Lucey, author of What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk
The weirdness of modern gender lies at the heart of Mat Fournier's groundbreaking book, which traces how the gender binary emerged in the early twentieth century. Dysphoric Modernism conjures the magic of queerness and reminds us that its power can't be extinguished even in the darkest of times. -- Teagan Bradway, author of Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading
Book Information
ISBN 9780231209533
Author Mat Fournier
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
