Dysphoric Modernism

Auteur
Mat Fournier is an associate professor of French at Ithaca College.

Texte du rabat

Bringing together trans theory with French literary studies, Mat Fournier offers a new understanding of how the gender binary emerged in the modernist era.

Résumé
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, André Gide, Jean Genet, and Colette, and lesser-known figures, including René 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.

Contenu
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. A Case Study: Schizophrenic Splits in La femme qui était en lui
2. Gide's Failed Marriages
3. Cross-Pollination: A Trans Reading of Marcel Proust
4. On Queer Crooks, Abjection, and Moving Sideways: Maurice Sachs's Dysphoric Smuggling
5. Intermittent Miracles: Queer Time and Temporal Dysphoria
   Notes
   Bibliography
   Index