Dysphoric Modernism: Undoing Gender in French Literature

Columbia University Press, 2025

During the interwar years, modernist literature challenged norms around sex and sexuality through daring portrayals of queerness. The same moment, however, witnessed the crystallization of the Western gender binary and its stark lines of division between male and female. Bringing together trans theory with French literary studies, Mat Fournier offers a new understanding of how the gender binary emerged in the modernist era. Examining the complex entanglements of gender and sexuality with the colonial project, Fournier argues that modernist writers’ representations of sexual dissidence came at the cost of their enforcement of racial and gendered discrimination. Dysphoric Modernism tracks the dysphoria inherent to modern gender and demonstrates the significance of the concept of dysphoria for a number of fields.