Ratatouille & French Thought
By FUPress
7th July 2014
As we were flipping through our catalog of books on French Thought this month, we came upon a chapter that we thought our readers might be interested in:
What’s Queer about Remy, Ratatouille, and French Cuisine
Laure Murat
This smart and fun chapter comes from What’s Queer about Europe?: Productive Encounters and Re-enchanting Paradigms, edited by Mireille Rosello, and Sudeep Dasgupta.
We hope you enjoy this chapter, as much as we did!
What’s Queer about Europe? examines how queer theory helps us initiate disorienting conjunctions and counterintuitive encounters for imagining historical and contemporary Europe. This book queers Europe and Europeanizes queer, forcing a reconsideration of both. Its contributors study Europe relationally, asking not so much what Europe is but what we do when we attempt to define it.
The topics discussed include: gay marriage in Renaissance Rome, Russian anarchism and gender politics in early-twentieth-century Switzerland, colonialism and sexuality in Italy, queer masculinities in European popular culture, queer national identities in French cinema, and gender theories and activism. What these apparently disparate topics have in common is the urgency of the political, legal, and cultural issues they tackle. Asking what is queer about Europe means probing the blind spots that continue to structure the long and discrepant process of Europeanization.
Mireille Rosello teaches at the University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis). She focuses on globalized mobility and on queer thinking. Recent publications include a coedited collection of articles on multilingualism in Europe (Multilingual Europe, Multilingual Europeans, 2012, with Laszlo Maracz), and monographs such as The Reparative in Narratives: Works of Mourning in Progress (2010), France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters (2005), and Postcolonial Hospitality (2002).
Sudeep Dasgupta is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is affiliated with the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), the Amsterdam Centre for Globalization Studies (ACGS). His publications include the edited volume Constellations of the Transnational: Modernity, Culture, Critique (2007), articles in Parallax, South Asian Studies, (In)Visible Culture, Transformations, Borderlands, and articles in anthologies on aesthetics and visual culture, critical theory, film studies, media studies, postcolonial and queer theory.