What's Queer about Europe?: Productive Encounters and Re-enchanting Paradigms
What's Queer about Europe?: Productive Encounters and Re-enchanting Paradigms
Mireille Rosello
Sudeep Dasgupta
Copyright Date: 2014
Published by: Fordham University Press
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783
Pages: 240
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x0783
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Book Info
What's Queer about Europe?: Productive Encounters and Re-enchanting Paradigms
Book Description:

What's Queer about Europe? examines how queer theory helps us initiate disorienting conjunctions and counterintuitive encounters for imagining historical and contemporary Europe. This book queers Europe and Europeanizes queer, forcing a reconsideration of both. Its contributors study Europe relationally, asking not so much what Europe is but what we do when we attempt to define it. The topics discussed include: gay marriage in Renaissance Rome, Russian anarchism and gender politics in early-twentieth-century Switzerland, colonialism and sexuality in Italy, queer masculinities in European popular culture, queer national identities in French cinema, and gender theories and activism. What these apparently disparate topics have in common is the urgency of the political, legal, and cultural issues they tackle. Asking what is queer about Europe means probing the blind spots that continue to structure the long and discrepant process of Europeanization.

eISBN: 978-0-8232-5539-9
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.1
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-vi)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.2
  3. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (pp. vii-x)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.3
  4. INTRODUCTION. Queer and Europe: An Encounter
    INTRODUCTION. Queer and Europe: An Encounter (pp. 1-24)
    Sudeep Dasgupta and Mireille Rosello
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.4

    Neither American, nor Dutch, nor French, nor German, nor British, nor Swiss, we proclaim ourselves Queer Europeans. But unlike Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, the authors of the 1989In Praise of Creoleness, we do not write in praise of Queer Europe.¹ Rather, we wish to interrogate the encounter between Queer and Europe.

    We are concerned that Europe as a project and an embattled reality, and Queer as a paradigm and discipline, are often met with skepticism. A sense of being fraught, perhaps increasingly irrelevant, even passé, makes both Europe and Queer appear not very urgent as issues...

  5. QUEER HISTORIES:: IMAGINING OTHER EUROPEAN CONSTRUCTIONS
    • (Same-Sex) Marriage and the Making of Europe: Renaissance Rome Revisited
      (Same-Sex) Marriage and the Making of Europe: Renaissance Rome Revisited (pp. 27-47)
      Gary Ferguson
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.5

      In the context of a collective project bringing into dialogue queer theory and Europe, what place might be accorded to a reflection grounded in the sixteenth century—a time when the first of the two terms in question did not exist as a conceptual category and the second had radically different meanings from today? Despite the degree of anachronism involved in approaching historical material through modern frames of analysis, I have proposed elsewhere that queer can be turned fruitfully toward the past in a number of ways.¹ First, it can be beneficial to linger over, to “interrogate” moments in early...

    • A Case of Mistaken Identity: Female Russian Social Revolutionaries in Early-Twentieth-Century Switzerland
      A Case of Mistaken Identity: Female Russian Social Revolutionaries in Early-Twentieth-Century Switzerland (pp. 48-68)
      Dominique Grisard
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.6

      This essay is about a true story. A true story about faking it. Faking being a European. And faking being a man. A story about a fake man impersonating a European woman. This is a story about fictitious marriages and mistaken identities in early-twentieth-century Europe, about a female Russian terrorist who turned a posh Swiss alpine resort into a truly international murder scene.

      In a time when European nations were consolidating their constitutional democracies, much energy was devoted to symbolically fortifying Europe against the Russian empire. In this essay, I will interrogate the impact of revolutionary Russian women on European...

    • Straight Migrants Queering European Man
      Straight Migrants Queering European Man (pp. 69-78)
      Nacira Guénif
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.7

      In the late 1950s, the Europeanization of France coincided with its de-imperialization, yet it was a culturally uncertain paradigmatic shift.¹ France as a nation and as a notion had undergone an unprecedented metamorphosis since the French Revolution. Contemporary France is faced with the task of actually implementing its democratic values around ethnic, gender, and social issues. The change also unearthed forgotten internal and external boundaries that were, until recently hitherto concealed by the vestigial presence of the exotic confined to the outback of the Empire, this presence today rooted in its very center and repackaged as western democracies.

      The sudden...

  6. QUEERING EURO-GLOBAL POLITICS
    • Queering European Sexualities Through Italy’s Fascist Past: Colonialism, Homosexuality, and Masculinities
      Queering European Sexualities Through Italy’s Fascist Past: Colonialism, Homosexuality, and Masculinities (pp. 81-90)
      Sandra Ponzanesi
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.8

      In Italy, Ettore Scola’s filmA Special Day(Italy, 1977) left an indelible mark and continues to be acknowledged as a masterpiece that transcends national cultures and cinematographic traditions. Set at the time of Italian fascism during the 1930s, the film takes radical positions on love and politics. Emerging after neorealism, Italian comedy, and the political cinema of the 1970s, it develops a clear narrative through a polished, yet naturalistic, style that combines different Italian traditions.

      We could attribute the lasting impact of the film to a number of factors. The lead actors Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren are internationally...

    • Queer, Republican France, and Its Euro-American “Others”
      Queer, Republican France, and Its Euro-American “Others” (pp. 91-114)
      Lucille Cairns
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.9

      Queer theory has a complex relationship with the political. This essay investigates both the productivity and problems of one highly politicized queer critique of the French Republic, from sociologist Marie-Hélène Bourcier. Given France’s historic importance in the construction of the European Union, the French state can be deemed a central European institution. Yet it is distinct from other member countries of the EU in its inimitable brand of republicanism, for which the most common, if not entirely adequate, synonym is “universalism.”

      One of Bourcier’s prime concerns is the relationship of the French republican state to its sexual, gendered and ethnic...

  7. FROM EUROPEAN GRAND NARRATIVES TO QUEER COUNTER-STORIES
    • Sick Man of Transl-Asia: Bruce Lee and Queer Cultural Translation
      Sick Man of Transl-Asia: Bruce Lee and Queer Cultural Translation (pp. 117-135)
      Paul Bowman
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.10

      Bruce Lee has always been construed as a figure that existed at various crossroads—a kind of chiasmatic figure, into which much was condensed and displaced. His films, even though they are in a sense relatively juvenile action flicks, have also been regarded as spanning the borders and bridging the gaps between “trivial” popular culture and “politicized” cultural movements (Brown; Morris; Prashad; Kato). That is, although on the one hand, they are all little more than fantastic choreographies of aestheticized masculinist violence, on the other, they worked to produce politicized identifications and modes of subjectivation that supplemented many popular cultural–...

    • What’s Queer about Remy, Ratatouille, and French Cuisine?
      What’s Queer about Remy, Ratatouille, and French Cuisine? (pp. 136-147)
      Laure Murat
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.11

      “What’s queer about Remy?” is the question that I will ask aboutRatatouille(2007), the spectacular animated blockbuster film from Pixar Studios that won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and a dozen other international prizes. What visual and textual rhetoric does the film use to transform a rat, an object of disgust associated with disease and filth, into a celebrated French chef? I propose to analyze the ways in whichRatatouillequeers not just sexualized categories but also the spatialization of social roles, the notion of national culture, as well as the opposition between humans and non-humans.

      Ratatouille...

    • Pathos as Queer Sociality in Contemporary European Visual Culture: François Ozon’s Time to Leave
      Pathos as Queer Sociality in Contemporary European Visual Culture: François Ozon’s Time to Leave (pp. 148-170)
      Emma Wilson
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.12

      This essay approaches queer through the issues of pathos, compassion and emotions. I argue here that European visual culture has, in recent years, allowed new access to, and connections with, pathos and the emotions mapped through visual and literary allusion. In Anglo-American queer theory, in particular in the wake of the AIDS crisis, pathos has roused caution and irritation. Lee Edelman writes: “Compassion can be a touchy subject, touching, as it does, on what touches the heart by seeming to put us in touch with something other than ourselves while leaving us open, in the process, to being read as...

    • Queer/Euro Visions
      Queer/Euro Visions (pp. 171-188)
      Carl F. Stychin
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.13

      In this essay, I use the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) as a site for illuminating how “Europe” and “queer” inform each other in a range of different ways. My central interest is in how both underscore a tension between the assertion and deconstruction of identity. Furthermore, I explore how the intersection of Europe and queer illustrates the relationship between universality and difference, and highlights how Eurovision is a space that can be politicized. More generally, I aim to demonstrate how Eurovision raises issues at the heart of European integration today.

      Why do I focus on Eurovision? It has long been...

  8. NOTES
    NOTES (pp. 189-212)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.14
  9. BIBLIOGRAPHY
    BIBLIOGRAPHY (pp. 213-232)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.15
  10. List of Contributors
    List of Contributors (pp. 233-236)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.16
  11. INDEX
    INDEX (pp. 237-246)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x0783.17
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