The Rhetoric of the Other: Lesbian and Gay Strategies of Resistance in French and Francophone Contexts (review)

In The Rhetoric of the Other: Lesbian and Gay Strategies of Resistance in French and Francophone Contexts, Martine Antle and Dominique Fisher assemble twelve essays selected from a conference they organized under the same title. By reinserting the implications of contemporary sexual politics into discussions of French and Francophone cultures, the editors make an important contribution to the growing field of French lesbian and gay studies. They single out republican universalism as a unique obstacle to the recognition of sexual difference in the public sphere, distinct from North American forms of homophobia including its construction of the closet. In addition to building on a tradition of queering the French canon, Rhetoric of the Other carries out nothing less than a queering of the French Republic itself.

The last of four parts, "(In)visibilities," elaborates on the focus laid out by Antle and Fisher in the introduction. After Joël Argote's examination of French cinema's othering of lesbian desire, Fisher examines prominent intellectuals' opposition to the Pacte Civil de Solidarité (pacs). Their homophobia is frequently based on an essentialist return to the laws of nature, which is paradoxical given the French roots of American anti-essentialist theory. Laurence Enjolras picks up on republicanism's heteronormativity as well as French academia's resistance to lesbian and gay studies and the relative absence of queer studies in North American French curricula. Since, when acknowledged, homosexuality is often presumed predominantly male, Enjolras focuses on lesbian writers' "virtually unanimous reluctance to define themselves as lesbian" (165) but optimistically points to a new generation of detective novelists who defy this invisibility.

If, as a whole, Rhetoric of the Other queers the Republic, its second section takes up the nationalist canon with which the Republic is taught. By emphasizing the parody and theatricality involved in sadomasochism, Brigitte Mahuzier makes a compelling argument as to why s/m is central to Proust's ethics. In contrast with pity (which collapses the difference between self and other), "s/m stages ... the absolute alterity of the other, and thus the necessity ... of the sadist's complete attention to the other's otherness, to the other's pain ... " (74). In another highlight of the collection, James Creech historicizes the phallus (thus castrating it, so to speak) in a reading of Balzac. In The Girl with Golden Eyes, Henri de Marsay becomes the heroic (and queer) exception to the loss lamented in "Sarrasine," the castration upon which post-revolutionary masculinity is founded. Barbara Knauff rereads Diderot's La religieuse and revises arguments that it silences homoeroticism through Suzanne's refusal of sexual knowledge. Knauff instead unveils Suzanne's epistemological ambivalence, which she characterizes as a form of gender instability; Suzanne then becomes Diderot in drag as he attempts to seduce his friend, the marquis de Croismare. Finally, in a solid argument for including Renée Vivien in a traditionally male-centered queer canon, Gretchen Schultz counters characterizations of Vivien's poetry as derivative and shows how she infuses a female subjectivity into Baudelaire's, Verlaine's, and Louijs's objectifying representations of lesbianism.

Since language students are at an advantage for denaturalizing their own cultural assumptions, the French classroom constitutes a unique laboratory for insights into the pedagogy of all disciplines, insights considered in part one, "Queering Pedagogy." Linking closets in the canon with those of the classroom, Lawrence R. Schehr describes coming out as a pedagogical act and examines benefits of teaching Balzac's Le père Goriot from the perspective of lesbian and gay theory. Martine Delvaux describes how teaching aids testimonials has led her Québécois students to circle the wagons around their own national identities to avoid contamination by both homosexuality and Anglo-ness. Ultimately, however, the compassion elicited by such narratives...