The Body In French Queer Thought From Wittig To Preciado

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.

"Queer(y)ing Bodily Norms in Francophone Culture questions how a wide selection of restrictive norms come to bear on the body, through a close analysis of a range of texts, media and genres originating from across the francophone world and spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Each essay troubles hegemonic, monolithic perceptions and portrayals of racial, class, gender, sexual and/or national identity, rethinking bodily norms as portrayed in literature, film, theatre and digital media specifically from a queer and querying perspective. The volume thus takes 'queer(y)ing' as its guiding methodology, an approach to culture and society which examines, questions and challenges normativity in all of its guises. The term 'queer(y)ing' retains the celebratory tone of the term 'queer' but avoids appropriating the identity of the LGBTQ+ community, a group which remains marginalized to this day. The publication reveals that evaluating the bodily norms depicted in francophone culture through a queer and querying lens allows us to fragment often oppressive and restrictive norms, and ultimately transform them"--

One of the lasting legacies of colonialism is the assumption that families should conform to a kinship arrangement built on normative, nuclear, individuality-based models. An alternate understanding of familial aspiration is one cultivated across national borders and cultures and beyond the constraints of diasporas. This alternate understanding, which imagines a category of “trans-” families, relies on decolonial and queer intellectual thought to mobilize or transform power across borders. In Transforming Family Jocelyn Frelier examines a selection of novels penned by francophone authors in France, Morocco, and Algeria, including Azouz Begag, Nina Bouraoui, Fouad Laroui, Leïla Sebbar, Leïla Slimani, and Abdellah Taïa. Each novel contributes a unique argument about this alternate understanding of family, questioning how family relates to race, gender, class, embodiment, and intersectionality. Arguing that trans- families are always already queer, Frelier opens up new spaces of agency for both family units and individuals who seek representation and fulfilling futures. The novels analyzed in Transforming Family, as well as the families they depict, resist classification and delink the legacies of colonialism from contemporary modes of being. As a result, these novels create trans- identities for their protagonists and contribute to a scholarly understanding of the becoming trans- of cultural production. As international political debates related to migration, the family unit, and the “global migrant crisis” surge, Frelier destabilizes governmental criteria for the “regrouping” of families by turning to a set of definitions found in the cultural production of members of the francophone, North African diaspora.

The Sexual/Political engages with contemporary political issues in sexuality through a survey of modern philosophy, psychoanalytic thought, 20th-century political theory, and more recent queer philosophies. The book investigates how the sexual has perturbed philosophical, political, and psychoanalytic thought and how this has fed into discrimination against the LGBTQI community. It analyses the social stigmas applied to public and private sexual acts and the psychopolitical processes leading to the prevalence of neo-fascist populism in Italy and the world. Tracing the history of sexuality through Freud, Marx, Fanon, and Foucault, among many others, Bernini considers why the sexual has always been an exceptionally difficult object to consider in political theory. This book will be of key interest to scholars in queer theory; antisocial theory; psychoanalysis and politics; drive theory; political philosophy; critical theory; LGBTQIA+ issues; gender and sexuality studies; and Italian studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

While celebrating the centenary of the “annus mirabilis” of modernism, we now encounter modernism after postmodernist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, critical race, feminist, queer and trans writing and theory. Out of the figures, narratives and concepts they have developed, a less universal, more global, decentred, context-specific, interconnected modernism emerges. In “after modernism” the meanings of “after” include periodisation, homage and critique. This book attends to neglected genealogies and intertexts—“high” and “low,” yet offering unacknowledged ontological, epistemological, conceptual and figurative resources. How have artists of the Global South negotiated the hierarchical division of art capital into Western high art vs. Global-South culture? Modernity’s location has been the Western metropolis, but other origin stories have been centring slavery, colonialism, the nation-state. If modernity did not originate once, why not multiple and still-to-come modernities? Instead of a universalizable Western modernity vs. local non-Western traditions, the contributors to this book discern multiple modern traditions. Rather than reifying their heterogeneity, the authors tunnel for lost transnational connections. The nation-state and the citizen have together defined Western modernity and the “civilized.” Yet they have required the gender binary, gender and sexual normativity, assimilation, exclusion, forced migration, partition, segregation. In-between the public and the private, humans and the natural world, this book explores a multiple, relational modern subjectivity, collectivity and cosmic interconnectivity, whose space is indivisible, entangled, ever folding and unfolding. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Angelaki.

Aggression in Pornography focusses on the issue of violence in mainstream pornography and examines what we know, what we think we know, and what are some surprising research findings and insights about the place of violence within pornography today. The authors first review the modern pornography industry, theoretical claims about pornography as violence, and the ways in which aggression has been defined and measured in previous research. Next, they review the findings of empirical research on violent content in pornographic materials and the potential effects of such content on audiences . The main part of the book relies on systematically collected empirical data, as the authors analyze the content of hundreds of pornographic videos as well as more than a hundred interviews with men and women who regularly watch pornography. These analyses provide surprising insights regarding the prevalence of and trends in violent content within mainstream pornography, the popularity of violent and non-violent content among viewers, and variations in aggression by race and sexual orientation. As such, Aggression in Pornography will be of interest to students and researchers in sociology, gender and sexuality studies, and media and film studies, as well as to wider audiences who are interested in today’s pornography industry and to policymakers looking to devise empirically driven policies regarding this industry and its potential effects.

Straight Skin, Gay Masks and Pretending to Be Gay on Screen examines cinematic depictions of pretending-to-be-gay, assessing performances that not only reflect heteronormative and explicitly homophobic attitudes, but also offer depictions of gay selfhood with more nuanced multidirectional identifications. The case of straight protagonists pretending to be gay on screen is the ideal context in which to study unanticipated progressivity and dissidence in regard to cultural construction of human sexualities in the face of theatricalized epistemological collapse. Teasing apart the dynamics of depictions of both sexual stability and fluidity in cinematic images of men pretending to be gay offers new insights into such salient issues as sexual vulnerability and dynamics and long-term queer visibility in a politically complicated mass culture which is mostly produced in a heteronormative and even hostile cultural environment. Additionally, this book initially examines queer uses of sexuality masquerade in Alternate Gay World Cinema that allegorically features a world pretending to be gay, in which straights are harassed and persecuted, in order to expose the tragic consequences of sexual intolerance. Films and TV series examined as part of the analysis include The Gay Deceivers, Victor/Victoria, Happy Texas, William Friedkin’s Cruising and many other straight and gay screens. This is a fascinating and important study relevant to students and researchers in Film Studies, Media Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Sexuality Studies, Communication Studies and Cultural Studies.

Countersexual Manifesto is an outrageous yet rigorous work of trans theory, a performative literary text, and an insistent call to action. Seeking to overthrow all constraints on what can be done with and to the body, Paul B. Preciado offers a provocative challenge to even the most radical claims about gender, sexuality, and desire. Preciado lays out mock constitutional principles for a countersexual revolution that will recognize genitalia as technological objects and offers step-by-step illustrated instructions for dismantling the heterocentric social contract. He calls theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and Haraway to task for not going nearly far enough in their attempts to deconstruct the naturalization of normative identities and behaviors. Preciado’s claim that the dildo precedes the penis—that artifice, not nature, comes first in the history of sexuality—forms the basis of his demand for new practices of sexual emancipation. He calls for a world of sexual plasticity and fabrication, of bio-printers and “dildonics,” and he invokes countersexuality’s roots in the history of sex toys, pornography, and drag in order to rupture the supposedly biological foundations of the heterocentric regime. His claims are extreme, but supported through meticulous readings of philosophy and theory, as well as popular culture. The Manifesto is now available in English translation for its twentieth anniversary, with a new introduction by Preciado. Countersexual Manifesto will disrupt feminism and queer theory and scandalize us all with its hyperbolic but deadly serious defiance of everything we’ve been told about sex.