The queer turn in feminism

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. The author uses this particular temporal and intellectual juncture to look again at a certain history and theory of gender and sexuality. The book is divided into three parts. The first part deals with one of the thorniest conundrums of late 20th-century feminist theory and politics, namely, the question of the veil. It includes Berger's by now classical essay on the "Islamic Veil" and the politics of specularity. The second part focuses on the intersection between gender, language and national politics and proposes original rereadings of Benedict Anderson's studies of the relationship between languages and nations. The last part looks at gender and queer theories through lenses that are simultaneously retrospective and anticipatory, American and French, to try and account for the terms of both their exhaustion and their currency on one side and the other of the Atlantic.