The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender by Anne Emmanuelle Berger

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender by Anne Emmanuelle Berger Evan Litwack Anne Emmanuelle Berger. The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, 240 pp. ISBN 978-0-082-35385-2 Anne Emmanuelle Berger's The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender gives us fresh and exciting ways to consider—and consider anew—the conceptual and linguistic traffic between French and American theories of sex, gender, and sexuality, and the centrality of the idiom of performance to the making and remaking of modern feminist and queer knowledge domains. By carefully following "the aporias, the dissonances, even the productive inconsistencies" (4) that emerge as gender theories and their queer theoretical cognates move back and forth across the Atlantic, Berger stages a rigorous transnational account of the complex maneuvers through which concepts travel and travail across national and cultural borders. Unfolding across five somewhat discrete chapters, The Queer Turn in Feminism is distinctively attentive not only to that decidedly American design called "French theory," but also to a newer intellectual formation that is perhaps less widely known to U.S. audiences: the recently christened French invention named "American thought," around which the rise of gender studies has come to prominence in contemporary France. The view that gender is performative has, of course, achieved something of an axiomatic status for scholars working in or in between the fields of [End Page 199] feminist theory, queer theory, and performance studies. While this widely institutionalized conceptual frame may now bear the unfortunate mark of a certain obviousness, as Berger forcefully reminds us, it is nonetheless crucial. For what remains buried beneath at least twenty-some-odd years of U.S. left critical academic common sense are the variegated Franco-American geohistorical conditions of production, circulation, and reception that have allowed three interdisciplinary knowledge projects—feminist theory, queer theory, and performance studies—to share the same language even, if not especially, when they do not speak the same dialect. Judith Butler, for instance, famously put into conversation two nationally marked theoretics when she drew on philosophical resources from Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida (in short, "French theory") in order to contribute to a theatrically tinctured conception of gender (a term germane to the postwar American social sciences). The result, of course, was her now canonical account of gender as "a stylized repetition of acts" rendered socially intelligible by what she termed "the heterosexual matrix" (1990, 192). Berger thus presses us to ask: to what extent is gender performativity, an idea foundational if not altogether constitutive of the "'queering' of feminist thought" (5), a properly French or American formulation? In chapter 1, Berger situates herself as "participant-observer" (3) of sorts uniquely poised to pursue such complex quandaries. A French national who arrived at Cornell University in the 1980s during the heyday of French post-structuralism and its thinking of sexual difference, Berger then returned to France seven years into the next millennium at the very moment that American gender theory was being institutionalized in the French academy. This autobiographical detail is important because it highlights not only Berger's own particular standpoint of critical reception, but also keenly registers a larger historical narrative about gender studies' transatlantic residence and, indeed, resonance. If by 2007, as Berger argues, gender studies had waned in prominence in the U.S. university (she cites as evidence Butler's turn from gender to ethics and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's turn from sexuality to affect), in France, conversely, gender studies now feels "quite current" (2). By calling attention to the entangled temporalities of gender studies' transnational institutionalization, Berger impresses the need to rethink "on the one hand, a politics and a conception of genders and, on the other hand, the languages and cultures in which or from which this politics and this conception are being developed" (4). Berger's second chapter constitutes the centerpiece of The Queer Turn in Feminism. Here, Berger sets as her task to scrutinize how "American gender theory has always been 'queer'" (14). This task is set to work by way...