Queer Turn in Feminism

Catherine Porter is Professor of French Emerita at the State University of New York at Cortland and former president of the Modern Language Association. She has translated more than fifty books, including Bruno Latour's Down to Earth and Elisabeth Roudinesco's The Sovereign Self.

"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 "Even the most practiced readers of queer theory and feminist theory-perhaps especially those readers-will find that The Queer Turn in Feminism takes them into unexpected and exhilarating critical terrain. By staging the numerous critical encounters between "French theory" and "American theory" that continue into the present, by offering readings that are as theoretically nuanced as they are rhetorically engaging, Anne Berger reinvigorates old debates in order to open up crucial questions still to be addressed." -- -Elizabeth Weed Brown University "The scholarship of the book is a treat, as is the care with which Berger attends to distinctions or crafts a sentence." -- -E.S. Burt University of California, Irvine "Brilliantly exploring the paradoxes of an American feminism inspired and invigorated by French theory and a French etudes du genre stimulated by American queer theory, Anne Berger offers a fascinating romp through the vicissitudes of feminist and post-feminist ideas, performance studies, and identity politics on both sides of the Atlantic, shrewdly articulating the differences as she explores the translatability of progressive ideas." -- -Jonathan Culler Cornell University

• Acknowledgments 1. Parabasis (Before the Act) 2. Queens and Queers: The Theater of Gender in "America" 3. Paradoxes of Visibility in / and Contemporary Identity Politics 4. The Ends of an Idiom, or Sexual Difference in Translation 5. Roxana's Legacy: Feminism and Capitalism in the West Notes Works Cited Index