Queer French

French Queer Cinema examines the representation of queer identities and sexualities in contemporary French filmmaking. This groundbreaking volume is the first comprehensive study of the cultural formation and critical reception of contemporary queer film and video in France. French Queer Cinema addresses the emergence of a gay cinema in the French context since the late 1990s, including critical coverage of films by important contemporary directors such as Francois Ozon, Sebastien Lifshitz, Patrice Chereau, Andre Techine and Christophe Honore. Nick Rees-Roberts transposes contemporary Anglo-American Queer Theory to the study of French screen culture, drawing particular attention to issues of race and migration such as problematic fantasies of Arab masculinities in queer cinematic production. This theoretically-informed book engages with a number of fault-lines running through queer cultural representation in France including transgender dissent and the effects of AIDS and loss on the formation of queer identities and sexualities.

In this book Denis M. Provencher examines the tensions between Anglo-American and French articulations of homosexuality and sexual citizenship in the context of contemporary French popular culture and first-person narratives. In the light of recent political events and the perceived hegemonic role of US forces throughout the world, an examination of the French resistance to globalization and 'Americanization', is timely in this context. He argues that contemporary French gay and lesbian cultures rely on long-standing French narratives that resist US models of gay experience. He maintains that French gay experiences are mitigated through (gay) French language that draws on several canonical voices - including Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre - and various universalistic discourses. Drawing on material from a diverse array of media, Queer French draws out the importance of a French gay linguistic and semiotic tradition that emerges in contemporary textual practices and discourses as they relate to sexual citizenship in 20th- and 21st-century France. It will appeal to an interdisciplinary readership in gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, linguistics, media and communication studies and French studies.

Queer Maghrebi French investigates the lives and stories of queer Maghrebi and Maghrebi French men who moved to or grew up in contemporary France and how these queer men living in France and the diaspora stake claims to time and space, construct kinship, and imagine their own future.

The Body in French Queer Thought from Wittig to Preciado: Queer Permeability identifies a common concern in French queer works for the materiality of the body, arguing for a return to the body as fundamental to queer thought and politics, from HIV onwards. The emergence of queer theory in France offers an opportunity to re-evaluate the state of queer thought more widely: what matters to queer theory today? The energy of queer thinking in France – grounded in activist groups and galvanised by recent hostility towards same-sex marriage and gay parenting – has reignited queer debates. Examining Paul B. Preciado’s experimentation with theory and pharmaceutical testosterone; Monique Wittig’s exploration of the body through radically innovative language; and, finally, the surgical performances of French artist ORLAN’s ‘Art Charnel’, this book asks how we are able to account for the material body in philosophy, literature, and visual image. This is an important work for academics and students in French studies, in Anglophone queer studies, gender and sexuality studies and transgender studies, and will have significant interest for specialists of cultural translation and visual art and culture.

Who's afraid of "gender theory"? -- The many meanings of queer -- Transatlantic homecomings -- The specter of queer politics

In this book Denis M. Provencher examines the tensions between Anglo-American and French articulations of homosexuality and sexual citizenship in the context of contemporary French popular culture and first-person narratives. In the light of recent political events and the perceived hegemonic role of US forces throughout the world, an examination of the French resistance to globalization and 'Americanization', is timely in this context. He argues that contemporary French gay and lesbian cultures rely on long-standing French narratives that resist US models of gay experience. He maintains that French gay experiences are mitigated through (gay) French language that draws on several canonical voices - including Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre - and various universalistic discourses. Drawing on material from a diverse array of media, Queer French draws out the importance of a French gay linguistic and semiotic tradition that emerges in contemporary textual practices and discourses as they relate to sexual citizenship in 20th- and 21st-century France. It will appeal to an interdisciplinary readership in gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, linguistics, media and communication studies and French studies.

A full account of the formation and reception of contemporary queer film in France.

This book explores the space of queer documentary through the modernist optic of Marcel Proust’s ‘lieu factice’ (artificial place), a perspective that problematizes the location of place in a post-postmodern world with a dispersed sense of the real. The practice of queer documentary in France and Italy, from the beginning of the new millennium onwards, is seen to re-write the coherence of ‘place’ through a range of emerging queer realities. Proposing the post-queer as a way of contending with the spatial dynamics of these contexts, analysis of key texts positions place as mourned, conceded and intersectional. The performance of place as agency is considered through the notional film, the radical archive of documentary, the enactment of politics, queer indeterminacy and a phenomenology of the object, the frame and queer mobility. The central themes of family, gender, dis/location, in/visibility and re/presentation question blind investment in the integrity of being emplaced.