Lesbian Trouble: Feminism, Heterosexuality, and the French Women's Liberation Movement

In Lesbian Trouble, Ilana Eloit uncovers the lost history of lesbian exclusion at the heart of the French Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF). Challenging decades of narratives claiming that French second-wave feminism embraced female homosexuality, Eloit demonstrates that the MLF was fundamentally inhospitable to lesbianism—and, particularly, to its lesbian cofounder Monique Wittig. Combining queer, postcolonial, and affect theories with deconstructive readings of the feminist archive and oral interviews, Eloit recovers buried controversies on lesbianism and explains the importance of Wittig’s exile to the United States in 1976 for North American queer theory. Featuring dozens of rarely seen photographs documenting lesbian activism, Eloit’s critical history traces an unexpected feminist genealogy of contemporary French conservatism that illuminates ongoing debates on gender, race, and sexuality, showing how these aspects of MLF history continue to haunt feminist and universalist politics today.