Review: Maxime Foerster, The Politics of Love: Queer Heterosexuality in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2018)

Abstract

Published in a series that aims to explore the historical developments that inform our concepts of modernity on both sides of the Atlantic, Maxime Foerster’s exploration of The Politics of Love: Queer Heterosexuality in Nineteenth-Century French Literature arrives at a perfect time in the post-#MeToo society in which we find ourselves. Queer theory increasingly allows us to interrogate even the most monolithic of sexual realities, many of which find their basis in the French nineteenth century. Indeed, despite recent French misgivings surrounding the rise of la théorie du genre, it is important to remember that both our conceptions of gender and sexuality and the deconstructions of them are equally (and ironically) informed by French thought.