The Inverted Gaze: Queering the French Literary Classics in America

In a thought-provoking and free-minded journey across six centuries of literary classics and sexual polemics, Francois Cusset investigates the queering of the French literary canon by American writers and scholars. In The Inverted Gaze, Cusset presents the foundations and rationale for queer theory, the field of study - established in the 1990s and promulgated by the likes of Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Warner (in the wake of Michel Foucault) - which challenges a supposed `heteronormative' ideology in Western culture.