Dysphoric Modernism

Employing trans theory, this week’s review analyzes how the gender binary functioned in French modernist literature.

Posted on July 14, 2025 in Reviews of the Month

Dysphoric Modernism: Undoing Gender in French Literature

Fournier, Mat. Columbia, 2024
296p bibl index, 9780231209526 $140.00, 9780231209533 $35.00, 9780231557986

This is an unusual work of scholarship because it is explicitly and intensely personal. Applying trans theory to four canonical figures of the modernist era—Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jean Genet, and Colette—and four lesser-known but still influential authors—René Crevel, Raymond Radiguet, Maurice Sachs, and Maurice Rostand—Fournier (Ithaca College) writes from the perspective of a trans studies scholar who has undergone hormone replacement therapy. In his introduction, he lays bare a life-long journey of physical and mental distress due to the fundamentally violent and oppressive structure of the gender binary, which, he says, still defines politics, society, and literature. Focusing on the multiple ways gender and power intersect in a capitalist-imperialist system, Fournier argues that today’s notion of gender assemblage has its origins in the first decades of the 20th century. His analysis of disruptive desires, sexual dissidence, and colonialism in Gide is new and convincing. His readings of Rostand’s La femme qui était en lui (The Woman in Him) and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time are all the more compelling because they are couched in the conviction that dysphoria affects everyone. This is an original book about complex entanglements and troubling paradoxes.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.
Reviewer: C. B. Kerr, emerita, Vassar College
Interdisciplinary Subject: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Studies
Subject: Humanities – Language & Literature – Romance
Choice Issue: Jun 2025

Dysphoric Modernism

Employing trans theory, this week’s review analyzes how the gender binary functioned in French modernist literature.