Queer Theory in France
Dr Hector Kollias, Department of French is Principal Investigator on this new project, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under its Early Career Research Grants scheme. His co-Investigator is Dr Oliver Davis at the University of Warwick.
The project seeks to interrogate the relatively late arrival of queer theory in France, particularly given the fact that the influence of French post-war thought in the development of queer theory in the American and British intellectual context is undeniable. What happened to the ideas of prominent French thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, or Lacan when they were put to use by Anglo-American queer theorists? Why has France been resistant to a by-product of its own intellectual tradition? What is the role of French academic institutions in this resistance? How was the re-introduction of queer theory into the French context influenced by the cultural prominence in France of psychoanalysis? How fundamental are these contextual differences in producing widely different results in the dissemination of queer ideas, as well as in the practice of queer activism in France, compared to the UK and the USA? These are some of the major questions the project seeks to investigate in its 3-year duration from October 2012 to September 2015. Housed in departments of French Studies, the project is nevertheless, like queer theory itself, inherently interdisciplinary.
The project will include two PhD studentships, one at King’s with the aim of investigating theoretical issues, and one at Warwick with the aim of investigating issues related to institutional, historical and political contexts. The project’s outputs will include a series of one-day workshops; a major international conference; an edited book as well as an edited special issue of a journal, both based on the workshops and conference; and two public panel debates held in London and Paris and aiming to reach outside academia and to connect with the wider public.