Roxana and Other Feminist (Hi)stories

Abstract

Roxana and Other Feminist (Hi)stories The Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender by Anne Emmanuelle Berger, translated by Catherine Porter. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. 240 pages. $29.00 paperback, $110 hardcover.While many U.S. scholars have turned their attention away from and queer those working in other parts of the world-such as France or Spain-have only recently recognized and welcomed these discursive frameworks. The fact that Anne Emmanuelle Berger is active in both and French academic contexts allows her to examine the dislocated scene of and queer and to perform a series of analytical gestures that provide novel insights into current feminist and debates. Berger thus manages to challenge the reductive narratives and assumptions that are unfortunately still reiterated in most of the discourses on queer, and feminism in the West.One of these analytical gestures is Berger's insistence that and queer should be understood as heterogeneous and productively inconsistent fields. This approach underlines arguments presented in the second chapter (11-82) in which she traces a genealogy of the theatre of and the 'queering' of feminist thought. More specifically, Berger challenges the narrative that gender theory arose in the United States in the 1980s as a provocation by the so-called French thought of the 1970s and has subsequently returned to Europe after its American invention. According to Berger, the conception of as most famously articulated by Judith Butler does not stem solely from the latter's rereadings of Foucault's analytics of power. Rather, has been theorized as since the 1950s both in the United States (by John Money and later by Robert Stoller, Esther Newton, and Erving Goffman) and in France by Jacques Lacan, who drew on Joan Riviere's notion of the feminine masquerade.Throughout the second chapter, Berger also contests the conventional and chronological distinction between and queer theory. First, she argues that has always been queer. This is because, as she illustrates with her readings, evolved in close proximity to what normative discourses call sexual deviance and because without drag (i.e., the theatricality of gender) there is no possibility of erotic relation and sexuality. Second, Berger contends that gay and lesbian studies cannot do without and its (feminist) theory. She supports this claim with her analysis of Sexual Traffic, the famous interview between Butler and Gayle Rubin, in which Rubin rejects as both a tool and an object of her analysis and leans instead toward a postfeminist study of sex and sexuality.1 Berger shows, gender, however, continues to haunt Rubin's wishfully gender-free discourse.The decision to challenge dominant narratives also characterizes the third chapter of the book, Paradoxes of Visibility in/ and Contemporary Identity Politics. Here, Berger discusses how the couples of gender and performance and gender and queer theory, as introduced and analyzed in the previous chapter, relate to current identity politics. Berger identifies what she calls the demand for visibility to be a major feature of the struggles of minority identities and sexualities and their analytical appropriations (83-106). She further claims that the demand for visibility cannot be explained solely as an attempt to complete the typical program of Enlightenment. Rather, the desire to be visible is inscribed in the theatrical structure of as well as its theoretization. According to Berger, this demand for visibility is also perpetuated by its avatar, queer theory. Queer questioning of does not simply imply a way out of the paradigm of visibility: As soon as there is theatre, there are roles, and as soon as there are roles, tends to reconstitute itself visibly, even in a queer fashion (88). …