Description: At a time when gender and queer theories appear to its American proponents to have exhausted themselves, they are hailed in France as something "new". Yet, more than any area of late 20th-century thinking, gender theory and its avatars have been to a large extent a Franco-American invention. A Franco-American scholar, the author uses this particular temporal and intellectual juncture to look again at a certain history and theory of "gender" and "sexuality."
Brief description: Anne Emmanuelle Berger is currently professor of French Literature and Gender Studies at the Universite Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis, where she heads the Centre d'etudes feminines et d'etudes de genre. She is also director of a new national Institute for Gender Studies (Institut du Genre), backed by the CNRS and 32 French institutions for higher education. Her most recent publications include Demenageries: Thinking (of) Animals After Derrida.
Review Quotes: Berger's work spans two academic idioms and cultures--that of the United States on the one hand, and of France on the other--to examine the conceptual, performative, indeed theatrical work produced by the examination of gender. From a consideration of how gender produces all sorts of translational conundra, to how the theoretical apparatus for gender analysis is borrowed from one continent, developed in another, and then shuttles back and forth, she discusses how the forms of resignification that take place constitute the ground of queer critique and its relation to gender, identity, and non-binary, and non-identitarian thinking. Thinking through "gender" and "sexual difference" and understanding the possibilities ascribed to these traveling terms allows Berger also to consider the production and reproduction of difference in relation to the history of feminist and queer link to the advance of capital. Through a brilliant final chapter on prostitution or sex work, she questions the manner in which feminist and queer critiques embody a contradictory relationship to capitalist development even as they espouse a Marxist critique. She does not dwell on contradiction for the sake of it, but rather considers it as a lesson about the frames that break apart potentially under the pressure of current thinking around gender, sexual difference, and queer theory. The book is both intellectually stimulating and thoroughly teachable.-----Ranjana Khanna, Duke University