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Finalist, 2025 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Studies
Winner, 2025 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
During the interwar years in France, modernist literature challenged norms around sex and sexuality through daring portrayals of homosexuality and queerness. The same moment, however, witnessed the crystallization of the Western gender binary and its stark lines of division between male and female. Bringing together trans theory with French literary studies, Mat Fournier offers a new understanding of how the gender binary emerged in the modernist era.
Dysphoric Modernism considers gender deviance in works by a broad range of French authors, both writers who are canonical for queer theory, such as Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jean Genet, and Colette, and lesser-known figures, including René Crevel, Raymond Radiguet, Maurice Sachs, and Maurice Rostand. Its trans readings track the dysphoria inherent to modern gender and the many ways these texts both disrupt and reinforce it. Examining the complex entanglements of gender and sexuality with the colonial project, Fournier argues that modernist writers’ representations of sexual dissidence came at the cost of their enforcement of racial and gendered discrimination. A groundbreaking transgender analysis of French modernist literature, this book also demonstrates the significance of the concept of dysphoria for a number of fields.
— Chris Coffman, author of Queer Traversals: Psychoanalytic Queer and Trans Theories
Proust is at the heart of Dysphoric Modernism, along with a crowd of other well-known and less well-known contemporaries who together produce a collective, shimmering cloud of gender dysphoria, a term Fournier compellingly repurposes so that we can perceive in this modernist moment a “gender assemblage” that is “bursting” or “leaking,” and thereby revealing gender’s implication in all we do and are.
— Michael Lucey, author of What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk
The weirdness of modern gender lies at the heart of Mat Fournier’s groundbreaking book, which traces how the gender binary emerged in the early twentieth century. Dysphoric Modernism conjures the magic of queerness and reminds us that its power can’t be extinguished even in the darkest of times.
— Teagan Bradway, author of Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading
This is an original book about complex entanglements and troubling paradoxes....Highly recommended.
Offers a methodological approach that could productively be extended to other literary periods and national traditions, inviting further scholarly exploration of how dysphoria functions as both a product of and ultimately resistance to gender assemblages.
The novelty of Dysphoric Modernism lies in its application of gender assemblage to French modernist literature in particular but also serves as an exemplary approach to literary analysis in any language.
An exciting and challenging book that will change the way readers approach the question of sexuality in Proust and Gide while also bringing an important set of less famous authors to the fore.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Case Study: Schizophrenic Splits in La femme qui était en lui
2. Gide’s Failed Marriages
3. Cross-Pollination: A Trans Reading of Marcel Proust
4. On Queer Crooks, Abjection, and Moving Sideways: Maurice Sachs’s Dysphoric Smuggling
5. Intermittent Miracles: Queer Time and Temporal Dysphoria
Notes
Bibliography
Index