The Body in French Queer Thought from Wittig to Preciado

"Tracking the rise of French queer activism in all its specificity, Elliot Evans challenges the Cartesian dualism that has compromised so much of our earlier, influential queer theorizing. In Queer Permeability, human bodies—sticky, porous, febrile, ravaged, ecstatic, abject, and singular—emerge less as objects of queer thought than as its indefatigable agents. A brilliant, necessary book, one that queer and trans thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic will want to read."

—Tim Dean, James M. Benson Professor, Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"The Body in French Queer Thought from Wittig to Preciado: Queer Permeability is a timely and lucid exploration of what the French context can teach us about the body. Working across very different media and genres, Elliot Evans proves an excellent guide to the French resonances, and some of the unexamined genealogical roots, of queer thought."

—J D Prosser, Reader in Humanities, School of English, University of Leeds

"This book makes a major contribution to queer and transgender studies by drawing on radical French queer thought and practice of the last three decades to develop a new understanding of the entangled interimplication of the material body and language in terms of ‘queer permeability’, a porosity which poststructuralist theory has tended to ignore. The book makes a compelling argument for theory’s transitivity in its material effects on bodies. Elliot Evans persuasively counters Judith Butler’s discursivist misapprehension of Monique Wittig’s textual materialism and presents by far the most substantial critical engagement to date with two pioneering works by Paul B. Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto and Testo Junkie, as well as a considered reappraisal of the political and aesthetic significance of ORLAN’s body art."

—Oliver Davis, Reader in French Studies, Warwick University

"The conventional wisdom regarding queer theory is that it derived from the reception of French post-structuralist thought in the United States, had conceptual difficulties dealing with the materiality of the body, and was a poor fit for many of the non-Anglophone contexts to which it was subsequently exported. Elliot Evans turns that received wisdom on its head to offer a persuasive, compelling alternative genealogy for contemporary French queer theory, one rooted not merely in the conversation with its American cousin, but in continental traditions of materialist feminism and the legacies of post-revolutionary universalism."

—Susan Stryker, Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, University of Arizona

"Tracking the rise of French queer activism in all its specificity, Elliot Evans challenges the Cartesian dualism that has compromised so much of our earlier, influential queer theorizing. In Queer Permeability, human bodies—sticky, porous, febrile, ravaged, ecstatic, abject, and singular—emerge less as objects of queer thought than as its indefatigable agents. A brilliant, necessary book, one that queer and trans thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic will want to read."

—Tim Dean, James M. Benson Professor, Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"The Body in French Queer Thought from Wittig to Preciado: Queer Permeability is a timely and lucid exploration of what the French context can teach us about the body. Working across very different media and genres, Elliot Evans proves an excellent guide to the French resonances, and some of the unexamined genealogical roots, of queer thought."

—J D Prosser, Reader in Humanities, School of English, University of Leeds

"This book makes a major contribution to queer and transgender studies by drawing on radical French queer thought and practice of the last three decades to develop a new understanding of the entangled interimplication of the material body and language in terms of ‘queer permeability’, a porosity which poststructuralist theory has tended to ignore. The book makes a compelling argument for theory’s transitivity in its material effects on bodies. Elliot Evans persuasively counters Judith Butler’s discursivist misapprehension of Monique Wittig’s textual materialism and presents by far the most substantial critical engagement to date with two pioneering works by Paul B. Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto and Testo Junkie, as well as a considered reappraisal of the political and aesthetic significance of ORLAN’s body art."

—Oliver Davis, Reader in French Studies, Warwick University

"The conventional wisdom regarding queer theory is that it derived from the reception of French post-structuralist thought in the United States, had conceptual difficulties dealing with the materiality of the body, and was a poor fit for many of the non-Anglophone contexts to which it was subsequently exported. Elliot Evans turns that received wisdom on its head to offer a persuasive, compelling alternative genealogy for contemporary French queer theory, one rooted not merely in the conversation with its American cousin, but in continental traditions of materialist feminism and the legacies of post-revolutionary universalism."

—Susan Stryker, Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, University of Arizona