Homosexuality in French History and Culture (review)

L'Esprit Créateur Barbedette, Spoiden met remarquablement en évidence comment un travail de déprise à l'endroit des représentations hégémoniques du sida exige de subvertir les différentes rhétoriques qui assignent les personnes vivant avec le sida à certaines formes d'exil—que celui-ci soit intérieur ou non. En envisageant la littérature du sida comme le théâtre où se négocie la scripturalisation de la maladie comme moyen de survie personnel et social, Spoiden à son tour signale une mutation paradigmatique dans la représentation de la maladie, puisqu'au fatalisme de la fin XIXe siècle a succédé, un siècle plus tard, une littérature du sida qui relève de l'activisme. Qu'il s'agisse d'un engagement sociopolitique—perspective que privilégie Caron—ou d'un engagement personnel contre l'immobilisme de la mort auquel l'auteur oppose la mobilité de la littérature—perspective qui fonde l'archéologie de Spoiden—la littérature du sida est envisagée par deux fois comme un espace social où s'impose une même urgence, celle de repenser les modèles narratifs qui sont au principe de nos identités. Alexandre Dauoe-Roth Bowdoin College Jeffrey Merrick and Michael Sibalis, eds. Homosexuality in French History and Culture. New York: Haworth, 2001. Published simultaneously as Journal of Homosexuality, 41:3/4. Assembling 17 essays on periods from the Renaissance through the 1990s, this collection fills in numerous gaps in the history of same-sex desire in France. Rather than comprehensive coverage, it offers a chronological series of "snapshots," many of which present recently-discovered archival material. Merrick, for example, reveals the police investigation of Jacques-François Pascal, who was executed for raping an errand boy in 1783 and whose case was previously known only from non-juridical sources and the sentence. In contrast with attempts to make Pascal a gay martyr, Merrick argues that his execution was unusual, due more to the violence of his actions than their sodomitical character. Uncovering information from a variety of sources, Sibalis paints a picture of the homosexual subculture around the Palais-Royal (1780s-1870s). Although France has not had sodomy laws since 1791, it does have a history of homophobia . Considering, like Sibalis, the frequent association of homosexuality and criminality in police records, William A. Peniston examines a ledger of arrests in the 1870s, and Susan Lanser describes Enlightenment fears about feminist separatism in reaction to female homoeroticism. However, as Nicholas Dobelbower demonstrates in describing sympathetic reactions to the public homoerotic displays of convicts during the Restoration, the history of homosexuality is more than a catalogue of repressions. Likewise, Olivier Blanc discusses the freeness with which the press treated same-sex extramarital affairs (1772-92). As these examples attest, this collection takes an interdisciplinary approach by drawing on a variety of discourses. From references to sodomy in songs (1660-1715) to popular understandings of male homosexuality in Belle Epoque print culture, Lewis C. Seifert and Michael L. Wilson bridge a divide between the purely literary and conventional archival material. Literary critics will be particularly interested in essays on earlier periods, from David Michael Robinson's reading of The Mémoires of Madame the Countess de M*** (1697), to Leonard Hinds's examination of female homosocial relationships in Scudéry, to Marc D. Schachter's innovative work on voluntary servitude in Montaigne. The collection also offers a number of reflections on the post-1968 lesbian and gay movement . Marie-Jo Bonnet reexamines misogyny in the gay movement from 1970 to the 1990s, and Jean Le Bitoux offers an insider's account of the Homosexual Liberation Groups. Both Olivier Jablonski and Georges Sidéris discuss the history of the gay press in France, with Sidéris focusing on the homophile movement's intolerance towards effeminate men (1950s). While much work remains to be done on gay and lesbian spaces in the provinces, several of the above-mentioned essays map out the development of queer spaces in Paris. Leslie Choquette rounds out these considerations in her examination of iconographie representations of the Champs-Elysées 100 Fall 2003 Book Reviews and nearby areas (1830...