As the joint-last monograph to be published in his lifetime, French Post-Modern Masculinities now stands as an epitaph to the late Lawrence R. Schehr. In this study Schehr extends previously published work to propose a complex thesis about contemporary masculinity and subjectivity. Although the monograph's title references the whole postmodern era, Schehr is concerned here with the last two decades, a period he characterizes as 'post-human' (p. 10). Schehr contends that the permanent connectedness brought about by economic globalization and the internet technologies of our age gives rise to new modes of being. In recent times, the author asserts, a new mode of rhizomatic subjectivity has developed, whereby subjects are permanently and virologically connected to each other, and also to machines. Schehr states that, in consequence of this, only the simulacrum of autonomous individual subjectivity remains. A 'new masculinity' (p. 11), marked by vulnerability, thus emerges. The studies of turn-of-the-millennium French novels, autofictions, films, and bandes dessine'es that follow aim to chart the ways in which the newly networked male self is imagined in certain French cultural productions, which have been deliberately - and sometimes provocatively - selected to represent popular, rather than high cultural, discourses of masculinity. It becomes clear that Schehr is chiefly interested in how these represented masculine subjectivities accommodate same-sex desire between men (or, occasionally, paedophilic desire-as in Nicolas Jones-Gorlin's Rose bonbon). He nonetheless avoids identifying his work as a study of French queer writing and cinema, partly because heterosexual authors feature too, but also because Schehr holds that this is a 'post-queer' age, in which sexual categorization is rendered redundant by a climate of acceptance of homosexuality. (This argument is, however, somewhat undermined by the homophobic discourses he identifies in the profoundly misanthropic works treated in his final chapter.) The visions of masculinity that Schehr charts range from the dystopian to the utopian. In contemporary AIDS writing, the state of 'seropositivity' (to use the author's neologism) allows men access to a subcultural network where Schehr finds individual subjectivity to be annihilated in the creation of a homoerotic 'pornotopia'. Conversely, in the case of writers like Michel Houellebecq, Maurice Dantec, and Marc-E' douard Nabe, Schehr suggests that the perceived demise of the invulnerable (and heterosexual) male subject engenders their apocalyptic imaginings of an amoral, sexually degenerate society governed only by sadistic and destructive impulses. This work offers provocative reading, and not only owing to the hard-core sexual content of some of the primary texts Schehr discusses. The thesis on post-queer masculinity is thought-provoking, though, arguably, based too often on a reductive notion of French (middle-class Parisian) gay male experience, and not all the author's readings are uniformly convincing. Theory is worn a little too loosely, with the lack of engagement with feminist and gender theory being particularly surprising. It is also unfortunate that quite frequent translation and typographical errors remain in the published copy. Nonetheless, precisely by virtue of its provocations, this book makes a valuable contribution to French sexuality studies, and certainly deserves the attention of researchers in the field. French Studies, Vol 66, no 3 This book makes a valuable contribution to French sexuality studies, and certainly deserves the attention of researchers in the field. French Studies, Vol 66, no 3
