Thursday March 16, 2017; 4:30PM | McCormick 106

The Department of French and Italian presents Professor Bruno Perreau (Cynthia L. Reed Professor, and Associate Professor of French Studies, MIT).

Professor Perreau will discuss his new book Queer Theory: The French Response (Stanford University Press, 2016), which shows how recent protests against gay marriage and adoption targeted American queer theory as part of a plot against the traditional French family and school system. Perreau questions transatlantic fantasies of identity by examining these protests alongside the actual presence of queer theory in France. With this study, he tackles new paradigms in queer theory such as “homonationalism” and the “gay international” as well as the fear of queer contagion in the context of contemporary French politics. The book argues that, in a queer perspective, the sense of belonging is not a given: it consists of a permanent critical reexamination of one’s relation to multiple communities.

Co-sponsored by The Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.