Along with three books and numerous articles on Renaissance literature and culture, I have published at the intersection of contemporary gender/sexuality studies and French/Francophone studies. Masculinities in Theory (second edition, 2023) is now a widely-cited monograph providing a series of theoretical models for considering masculinity studies from a literary/cultural perspective, especially as inflected by post-structuralist thought. The book synthesizes key approaches already in place and proposes new models. My more recent work extends that project into the relation between affect studies and masculinity, and I edited a major volume for Routledge on gender and affect that lays out a new future for gender/affect studies.
My current focus is twenty-first century French queer/trans* film, with Queer Cinema in Contemporary France (Manchester University Press, 2022, "French Film Directors" series) aiming to rethink what queer film means in twenty-first century French cinema. Recent article publications treat Maghrebi queer/trans* cinema’s reconsiderations of western assumptions about gender and sexuality. My current monograph project is titled “Transgender France: Universalism and Sexual Subjectivity,” which studies how the inception and development of the category of transgender/transsexual in France starting in the 1950s relates to political ideas on the “universalist” citizen. The corpus includes film, documentary, television, medicine, law, journalism, tabloids, autobiography, theatre, graphic novel, and novels.
Education & Training
- PhD, French, University of Michigan
- MA, French, University of Michigan
- BA, Oberlin College (French & Classics)
Representative Publications
Masculinities in Theory, Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2023. Second, revised edition.
The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect, Abingdon: Routledge, 2023.
Queer Cinema in Contemporary France: Five Directors, Aug. 2022, Manchester University Press, UK (series “French Film Directors”).
“Queering the French-Speaking Mediterranean,” edited special issue of Contemporary French Civilization, 2024.
“Situating Masculinities/Situer les masculinités,” edited special issue of Simone de Beauvoir Studies 32.2 (Fall 2022), with Kaliane Ung.
“Masculinity and Affect.” NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, Reeser and Gottzén, eds., 2018.
“Mercurial Queer: Transnational Networks in Contemporary Moroccan Cinema,” for Studies in World Cinema, 2024, special issue on global queer cinema
“Visualizing Transgender: Aoulad-Syad’s Bye-Bye Souirty (Adieu Forain),” in TransAfrica, ed. Chantal Zabus, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.
“Around and Around: Affective Masculinity in Circulation,” in Beyond Anthropocentric Masculinities: Posthumanism, New Materialism and the Man Question, ed. Ulf Mellstrom and Bob Pease (London: Routledge, 2022), 44-55.
“Genital Inspections in 1952: Staging the Appearance of Sex in France,” in Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 76.1 (2022): 31-44.
“LGBTQ Studies/French Studies,” French Studies 75.4 (fall 2021): 1-17.
“Transing Dynamics: Ozon’s Une Nouvelle amie (2014),” ReFocus: The Films of François Ozon, ed. Loïc Bourdeau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2021), pp. 143-161.
“Approaching Affective Masculinities,” in Routledge International Handbook of Masculinity Studies, eds. Lucas Gottzén, Ulf Mellström and Tamara Shefer (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 103-11.
Research Interests
Gender and Sexuality Studies; Critical/Gender Theory; Masculinities; Comparative and French Renaissance Studies; Montaigne; Contemporary French Cultural/Literary Studies; 21st-century French/Francophone film