Lesbian Inscriptions in Francophone Society and Culture Lesbian Inscriptions in Francophone Society and Culture. Edited by R <scp>enate</scp> Gü <scp>nther</scp> and W <scp>endy</scp> M <scp>ichallat</scp> . Durham University Press. 2007. vi+239 pp., 4 b&amp;w plates. Pb £19.50; $38.50; €30.00.

The 11 contributions to this collection, which arose out of a conference at Sheffield in 2004, explore how lesbianism has been represented from the early nineteenth to the twenty-first century. David Evans's opening essay on Baudelaire takes its cue from Wittig's admittedly ‘oblique’ description of him as ‘le poète lesbien’, and follows Claude Pichois in arguing that the figure of the lesbian expresses the poet's rejection of reproductive nature. Owen Heathcote suggests that the lesbian is portrayed as ‘femme-écran’ in both Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or and Chantal Akerman's film La Captive and that this affords a certain resistance to (presumably heterosexual) male appropriation. Lucille Cairns's zesty engagement with recent French, Belgian, Canadian and African cinema explains the generally more affirmative representation of lesbianism in the Belgian and Canadian films by the more accepting socio-legal contexts and longer-established traditions of state subsidy for the making and dissemination of specifically lesbian and gay films in those countries. Brigitte Rollet's useful analysis of lesbian characters in recent French mainstream television drama concludes, perhaps not altogether surprisingly, that television dramas are not especially probing in their analysis of the origins of homophobia. Mireille Brioude's indignant reception study of Violette Leduc's work lambasts mainstream academic critics for ignoring her work before suggesting, rather surprisingly, that ‘plus pernicieuse’ have been attempts by ‘les adeptes du militantisme gay’ to appropriate Leduc as a lesbian writer (p. 113). Yet Brioude fails to establish that recognizing the lesbian thematics in some of Leduc's writing and accordingly seeking to include her in genealogies of lesbian and gay writing in itself constitutes a denial of the other dimensions of her work. Ursula Tidd argues persuasively that Beauvoir offers an ultimately non-pathologizing exploration of female masculinity in Le Deuxième Sexe. Here, as in the queering which takes place in L'Invitée, Beauvoir is exploring and depathologizing ‘gender variance’, the disruptive potential of masculinities as they are performed by women, as well as lesbian identity in a stable sense. The last three contributions focus on spatial, architectural and design aspects of lesbian inscription: Amanda Crawley Jackson's reading of Albertine Sarrazin's and Elisabeth Cons's prison memoirs makes resourceful use of feminist and queer theorizations of space and seeks to move beyond the panoptic analysis of carceral experience presented by Foucault in Surveiller et punir. However, as Cons herself was imprisoned in Fleury-Mérogis, the rather different take on this establishment offered in the early 1970s by Foucault's own Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons might usefully also have been mentioned. Sheila Crane's closing comparison of Elsie de Wolfe's lavish restoration of the Villa Trianon at Versailles with Natalie Barney's cultivation of her rue Jacob salon explores how both drew on fantasies of aristocratic privilege even as they sought to give expression to transgressive female homoeroticism in the spaces they inhabited. This invigoratingly wide-ranging collection will be an invaluable resource for undergraduate readers and established scholars alike.

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