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Lesbian Trouble

Feminism, Heterosexuality, and the French Women's Liberation Movement

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Book

Pages: 352

Illustrations: 30 illustrations

Release Date: April 20, 2027

Author: Ilana Eloit

In Lesbian Trouble, Ilana Eloit uncovers the lost history of lesbian exclusion at the heart of the French Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF). Challenging decades of narratives claiming that French second-wave feminism embraced female homosexuality, Eloit demonstrates that the MLF was fundamentally inhospitable to lesbianism—and, particularly, to its lesbian cofounder Monique Wittig. Combining queer, postcolonial, and affect theories with deconstructive readings of the feminist archive and oral interviews, Eloit recovers buried controversies on lesbianism and explains the importance of Wittig’s exile to the United States in 1976 for North American queer theory. Featuring dozens of rarely seen photographs documenting lesbian activism, Eloit’s critical history traces an unexpected feminist genealogy of contemporary French conservatism that illuminates ongoing debates on gender, race, and sexuality, showing how these aspects of MLF history continue to haunt feminist and universalist politics today.

Praise

“Lesbian Trouble offers a beautifully crafted argument against the heteronormative foundations of French feminism and for the richly productive melancholic returns of its exiled lesbian ghost, Monique Wittig. Ilana Eloit effectively rewrites the canonical history of French feminism from the perspective of lesbian difference through a direct and devastating critique of the MLF and rich engagement with queer, feminist, and postcolonial theory.” - Victoria Hesford, author of Artificial Women: The 1970s, Mass Culture, and Feminism

&ldquot;Lesbian Trouble is a breakthrough text for feminist theorizing and a stunning achievement. Just when it seemed that a certain kind of feminist critical thinking had become exhausted, this book comes as a welcome revelation. Ilana Eloit offers a brilliantly original thesis and truly inspirational writing on the ways in which the exclusion of lesbians was foundational for a French feminism that nonetheless claimed to welcome them.” - Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History

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Author/Editor Bios

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Ilana Eloit is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Geneva.

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3991-4 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-3498-8 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6357-5 /