Abstract

This article offers a comparative examination of the status of ‘interdisciplinarity’, ‘cultural studies’ and ‘queer’ in the discipline of French studies in the Anglophone world and in France. It is argued that, while the intellectual origins of both interdisciplinarity and queer theory are French, a series of disavowals and appropriations has de-gallicized them. On the one hand, the cultural hegemony of English studies in the USA and the UK has led to a colonization and anglicization of continental thought. On the other, the resistance to cultural studies within the Hexagone has meant that work done in critical sexuality studies within the Anglo-American world over the past forty years is only now beginning to be felt within French-speaking contexts. In tracing this double history of dislocation, the article contextualizes the difficulty of thinking queer in properly French terms — and the importance of doing so.