Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French literature by Tracy L. Rutler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French literature by Tracy L. Rutler Miao Li Rutler, Tracy L. Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French literature. Liverpool UP, 2021. ISBN 978-1-80086-980-7. Pp. 304. The death of Louis XIV serves as a changing political climate that opens space to imagine diverse forms of social and political upheavals, among which are queer forms of kinship and intimate community. Through meticulous examination of literary works of the 1730s and 1740s, Rutler invites us to witness how their authors situate utopian society and subjectivity within the framework of the family. Her monograph proposes an in-depth look at the queer aspects in these texts, building upon psychoanalytical discourses of Foucault, Freud and Lacan, Derrida's notion of hauntology, and Freccero's queer approach of spectrality. Whereas most studies on the Enlightenment adopt principles such as a belief in linear progress or a teleological string of events, Rutler, drawing upon Kosofski Sedgwick's "reparative reading" and Lee Edelman's concept of "homographesis," suggests the innovative practice of reading queerly, stating that queer relationality allows for differences and unexpected occurrences in ways not available to the linear. This scholarly work will thus uncover how canonical Enlightenment authors present the potential of queer forms of kinship to dismantle the patriarchy. Examining Montesquieu's and Voltaire's earliest works of fiction, Rutler reveals that authors in early decades of the eighteenth-century still imagined ways of repairing the declining patriarchy. Yet, works of Prévost and Crébillon allow Rutler to pinpoint the potential of changing relations between men in public and intimate spheres. Prévost's works demonstrate how ghosts of women disrupt masculine desire and restore relations between men. Crébillon focused on a politics of the encounter during which desire is displaced outside of the œdipal structure. Finally, in Marivaux's and Graffigny's works, Rutler notes the crucial role of unmarried women in the construction of family and intimate communities that do not necessarily rely upon men. Marivaux imagines women's subjectivity which brings about an enlightenment shared among mothers and daughters. Graffigny, on her end, constructs and revises a world for women by creating an adaptive language of sisterhood. In all, Rutler invites us to see how these authors perform the radical task of queering the Enlightenment. The choice of these authors is by no means accidental, Rutler convincingly asserts that they are the most brilliant political theorists who communicate their philosophy through literature. Their attendance at salons, their letters, their engagement in fictional writings altogether serve as ways to interrogate the nature of politics and power through a subversive discourse of the family––breaking apart and rebuilding the family in various forms. Rutler eloquently demonstrates that through their novels and plays, the use of familial signifiers serves to queer the meaning of family and knowledge, the invocation of emotions and the imagination of utopian worlds, to [End Page 286] queer the Enlightenment. Published under the context of global pandemic, this book will not only appeal to premodern literary and historian scholars, but also capture the interest of a much wider readership who reflect on various possibilities for social and political organization, such as relationality, family, and intimate communities. [End Page 287] Miao Li University of Calgary (Alberta, Canada) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French