Dysphoric Modernism
Undoing Gender in French Literature
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Columbia University Press
Published:26th Nov '24
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Finalist, 2025 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Studies
Winner, 2025 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
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.
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
This is an original book about complex entanglements and troubling paradoxes....Highly recommended. * Choice *
Offers a methodological approach that could productively be extended to other literary periods and national traditions, inviting further scholarly exploration of how dysphoria functions as both a product of and ultimately resistance to gender assemblages. * French Forum *
- Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2025 (United States)
- Short-listed for Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Studies 2025 (United States)
ISBN: 9780231209533
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
296 pages