What's Queer About Europe?: Productive Encounters and Re-enchanting Paradigms

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Queer and Europe: An Encounter Sudeep Dasgupta and Mireille Rosello Queer Histories: Imagining Other European Constructions (Same-Sex) Marriage and the Making of Europe: Renaissance Rome Revisited Gary Ferguson A Case of Mistaken Identity: Female Russian Social-Revolutionaries in Early-Twentieth-Century Switzerland Dominique Grisard Straight Migrants Queering European Man Nacira Guenif Queering Euro-Global Politics Queering European Sexualities Through Italy's Fascist Past: Colonialism, Homosexuality, and Masculinities Sandra Ponzanesi Queer, Republican France, and Its Euro-American "Others" Lucille Cairns From European Grand Narratives to Queer Counter-Stories Sick Man of Transl-Asia: Bruce Lee and Queer Cultural Translation Paul Bowman What's Queer about Remy, Ratatouille, and French Cuisine? Laure Murat Pathos as Queer Sociality in Contemporary European Visual Culture: Francois Ozon's Time to Leave Emma Wilson Queer/Euro Visions Carl Stychin Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Mireille Rosello (Author) 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). She is currently working on a collection of essays on queer Europe (What Is Queer about Europe: Excentric Readings in History, Politics and Culture, coedited with Sudeep Dasgupta, forthcoming from Fordham University Press). Sudeep Dasgupta (Author) 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.

Review :
"This book stages multiple encounters between Europe and Queer as two paradigms of transgression - an unusual constellation that results in an imaginative set of investigations of different identity intersections, moving freely across time and space, and between cultural and political contexts in a wide range of genres and media. The essays deal with fascinating historical and contemporary phenomena and are written in a mode of communicative critique that opens up inner contradictions through unexpected dialogues. The result is an invitation to queer Europe transnationally, empowering but without utopian illusions, and far beyond the ordinary discourses in these two fascinating fields." - Johan Fornas, Professor of Media and Communication Studies, Sodertorn University, Sweden, author of Signifying Europe