Women in French Studies

In recent years, scholarship on the eighteenth century has sought in various ways to dismantle monolithic visions of European and French Enlightenment and its attendant narratives of progress, modernity, and rationality. Tracy L. Rutler's provocatively titled Queering the Enlightenment joins this tradition, proposing an innovative and exciting approach to re-reading familiar and lesser-known works of canonical authors such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Pierre de Marivaux, Françoise de Graffigny, Crébillon fils, and Antoine Prévost. Rutler urges readers to take these authors seriously as "political theorists" (5) who interrogate the notion of "family" and the entanglements of patriarchy and politics during a [End Page 188] period when the weakening of the monarchy after the death of Louis XIV allowed space for French writers to envision other possibilities for the organization of intimate communities and government. Alongside (or rather within) the proliferation of heteronormative images of kinship and the rise of the bourgeois family in the eighteenth century, Rutler illuminates another, subtler narrative. She argues that French novels and plays of the 1730s and 1740s, the period after the regency of Philippe II d'Orléans, envision "radical forms of kinship" (7) and queer kinship formations to imagine new possibilities for French society. These authors demonstrate how purposeful "reorganizations" of intimate relations can include "diverse and nonheteronormative structures" (xiv) and form communities composed of individuals of varying gender, class, and racial identities. These new relational structures could redefine family and thus reveal utopian "forms of democracy that might have been" (6).

Redefining family and "queering the Enlightenment"—which, Rutler explains, "means letting go of certain long-held principles of Enlightenment thought such as a belief in linear progress or a teleological string of events" (17)—both require "reading queerly" (7). This approach, informed by the work of theorists such as Lee Edelman and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, asks us to remain open to the serendipitous and the surprising in literature by "paying particular attention to the fruitful fractures between and within narration and language," to those moments when disjunctions or "cracks" between the text's content and form reveal the instability of gender, power, and sexuality and "allow us to uncover queer, utopian impulses even in works of seemingly heteronormative literature" (21). Rutler's introduction, "The Specter of Patriarchy," grounds this method of "reading queerly" in LGBTQ+ studies and in psychoanalytic analysis, political theory, and structuralism.

The book is organized into three parts, each centered on the transformations of heteronormative kinship figures. Part one, "Family Remains," focuses on the fragility of patriarchy in this period, as well as its potential reformation. The first chapter, "Toward a Queer Politics of Kinship," examines early theatrical works of Voltaire (Œdipe and Artémire) and Montesquieu's Lettres persanes to show how these authors "question systems of governance modeled on family politics" (41) and pave the way for later thinkers to more radically (if still subtly) challenge heteronormative family and community structures. Rutler's analysis of Lettres persanes through the lens of Jacques Rancière's conception of a politics of "dissensus" (53) brings a refreshing take to Montesquieu's much-discussed epistolary novel.

The second part, "Prodigal Sons," features re-readings of Prévost and Crébillon fils focused on the different "politics of encounter" (138) afforded by their visions of male homosociality. Informed by Carla Freccero's notion of "queer spectrality," Rutler's sharp analysis shows how the absent/deceased women central to Prévost's Manon Lescaut and Histoire d'une Grecque moderne enable the development of new models of sociable brotherhood that displace older, more hierarchical forms of patriarchy.

The third section, "Narrative Spinsters," centers on mother-daughter relationships and sisterhood in works by Pierre de Marivaux and Françoise de [End Page 189] Graffigny. In her third chapter, Rutler describes Marivaux's "maternal symbolic," characterized by "queer, utopian forms of feminine subjectivity" (182...