In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Queer Theory: The French Response by Bruno Perreau
  • Oliver Davis
Queer Theory: The French Response. By Bruno Perreau. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. x + 276 pp., ill.

This book—dedicated to the ‘pioneering’ work of journalist and, latterly, academic Didier Eribon by a former member of the seminar on ‘les homosexualités’ he co-convened (pp. x and vii)—presents a thoroughly partisan perspective on queer theory in France. It is astonishing how little attention is given to the innovative and very influential work of Paul B. (formerly Beatriz) Preciado, notably Manifeste contra-sexuel (Paris: Balland, 2000), and there is a gross over-simplification of activist collective Le Zoo’s project as the elimination of all norms. Remarkably for a book on queer theory, there is generally an absence of sustained discussion of theoretical texts and arguments; instead, the author offers a descriptively over-detailed reportage of events, focused overwhelmingly on public pronouncements to the detriment of analysis and argument. In its structure, the book—which opens with a seventy-four-page chapter on ‘Le Mariage pour tous’—confirms its complete accord with the priority given to marriage in Eribon’s assimilationist vision of gay and lesbian politics: homophobic insult creates a wounded subjectivity and, in Eribon’s case, as in that of his imitator Édouard Louis, the displaying of hurt is bound up with a repudiation of working-class culture, which is handed over as more than ever a ‘problem’ to be addressed by policy and policing interventions developed by the élite into which they have assimilated. Having [End Page 326] discredited as noxious their working-class heritage and elevated themselves from provincial Reims or Hallencourt to the capital, an abstract legal and civic universality is proffered in place of an unlived life of conflictual solidarity, an activist being-with; vulnerability is converted into a need for security governance. Queer disagreement with the assimilationist strategy’s twin emphases on vulnerability and ‘equal marriage’ has been driven by a belief that its consolidation of gay and lesbian civic identities also—collaterally, unwittingly—gives undue honour and obeisance to the state and its policing apparatus. The work of Jasbir Puar and Lisa Duggan, in particular, has done much to alert us to these unintended consequences; yet Bruno Perreau wishes simply to brush them aside, claiming simultaneously that homonationalism and homonormativity are fabrications and, most implausibly, that Puar may be running the risk of ‘stoking nationalism by associating it with given sexual identities and practices’ (p. 124). Puar and Duggan have shown that the assimilationist obsession with gay marriage and securing state protection of ‘our’ vulnerability has often been at the expense of rendering the racialized other less secure and more vulnerable: moves to securitize white, bourgeois gay and lesbian identity have gone hand in hand with the withdrawal of security from other less socially prioritized subjects. Perreau’s argumentatively flimsy response does not lead me to consider this any less of a problem, even allowing for the fact that his erroneous definition of ‘pinkwashing’ (p.119) results from a typographical mistake.

Oliver Davis
University of Warwick
...

pdf

Share