Gay Signatures: Gay and Lesbian Theory, Fiction and Film in France, 1945-1995

Review
"Original, cogently argued, and well researched." --MLR

"A very welcome collection." --FS

"A consistently challenging, accessible, and amply documented set of essays which avoid the naivetes of earlier criticism." --Forum for Modern Language Studies

"The individual chapters offer thoughtful, well-argued insights into gay literature in contemporary France."--The Lesbian Review of Books

"...all the contributors...write sharply, deploying contemporary theory with a command that makes their work pleasurable as well as intellectually rigorous reading." --Film and Theory Review


Book Description
This interdisciplinary book responds to the explosion of gay and lesbian creativity on modern-day France. Rather than attempting to formalize a specifically 'gay' or 'lesbian' style or identity, the authors seek to open up new 'homotextualities,' understood here as ongoing constructions and deconstructions of both homosexuality and its environments. They investigate the work of (among others) Violette Leduc, Tony Duvert, Renaud Camus, and Guy Hocquenghem; the cinema of Josiane Balasko and Cyril Collard; the theoretical writings of Leo Bersani, Luce Irigaray, and Monique Wittig. Employing a range of methods, authors re-evaluate and contest both the literary and theoretical canon and establish new convergences between French and Gay Studies, in particular, queer theory. This book provides the first proper assessment of the usefulness of this approach when dealing with a literary and cultural tradition notoriously discreet about the very concept of a gay writer.


About the Author
Owen Heathcote is a member of the Deptartment of Modern Languages,University of Bradford.

Alex Hughes is a Professor in French Studies, at the University of Birmingham.

James S. Williams is a Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature, at the University of Kent.



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Brings together critical essays written during the mid-1990s that reflect upon some of the ways in which French gay and lesbian identity has been inscribed and read in fictional, theoretical, and cinematic texts produced in the post-war period. The first section is composed of a series of interviews with leading writers, psychoanalysts and critics. The second contains a dozen essays that focus on gay writing since the Enlightenment. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.


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