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, which challenges a supposed "heteronormative" ideology in our culture. He then 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, 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 Honore 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 most prominent intellectuals.

François Cusset is the former director of the New York-based French Publishers' Agency, and is currently professor of American Studies at the University of Paris, and a series editor and contributor to many journals on both sides of the Atlantic. He is the author of French Theory (University of Minnesota Press), a pioneering account of four decades of intellectual and political life in the United States.

Francois Cusset's profile page

David Homel was born in Chicago in 1952 and left that city in 1970 for Paris, living in Europe the next few years on odd jobs and odder couches. He has published eight novels, from Electrical Storms in 1988 to The Teardown, which won the Paragraph Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction in 2019. He has also written young adult fiction with Marie-Louise Gay, directed documentary films, worked in TV production, been a literary translator, journalist, and creative writing teacher. He has translated four books for Linda Leith Publishing: Bitter Roase (2015), (2016), Nan Goldin: The Warrior Medusa (2017) and Taximan (2018). Lunging into the Underbrush is his first book of non-fiction. He lives in Montreal.

David Homel's profile page

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. He sees queer criticism as a break from the stuffy methodology of traditional literary criticism and instead champions the formation of an individual relationship with the text ... 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

Lambda Literary

Francois Cusset is an elegant, playful, occasionally outrageous writer ... [He shows] a flair for boisterous, intellectual tomfoolery.
-subTerrain

subTerrain

One of the things I found most fascinating about the book was Cusset's take on what makes a work of literature queer. Rather than focusing on what is explicitly queer such as the actual acts of sodomy or lesbian affection, Cusset says that being queer is about the loss of the self, "the art of being where nothing awaits you" and that "the queer approach... loudly proclaims lack of definition as its major virtue." ... Altogether a highly intriguing text.
-qPDX.com

qPDX.com

Imagine that a French theorist takes Judith Butler's Gender Trouble-itself a landmark 'translation' (in the loose sense) of French feminist philosophy and theory-and re-translates it back into a French context, and you will begin to glean where François Cusset is coming from in The Inverted Gaze. 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

Emily Apter

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.
-Windy City News

Windy City News