<i>QuébeQueer: le queer dans les productions littéraires, artistiques et médiatiques québécoises</i> . Sous la direction de Isabelle Boisclair, Pierre-Luc Landry et Guillaume Poirier Girard <i>QuébeQueer: le queer dans les productions littéraires, artistiques et médiatiques québécoises</i> . Sous la direction de BoisclairIsabelle, LandryPierre-Luc et Poirier GirardGuillaume. (Nouvelles études québécoises.) Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2020. 520 pp., ill.

While the transatlantic circulation of queer theory has led to a certain conservative defensiveness in parts of the French academy, in Quebec its progress has been as fitful, but less trammelled by national-cultural complexes. This hefty edited volume seeks to express the diversity of queer cultural and intellectual production in Quebec, and its inevitable theoretical Introduction draws happily and widely on both Anglo-American (such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) and French-based thinkers and precursors (such as Sam Bourcier, Michel Foucault, and Monique Wittig) to tackle the slippery problem of definition. If queer thought is about ‘la déconstruction de ces dispositifs visant à produire des sujets normatifs’ (p. 11), fluidity rather than fixity, provocation rather than assimilation, the editors, while recognizing ‘le risque de servir de fourre-tout’ (p. 14), are keen to emphasize the fact that ‘le queer embrasse plus large’ (p. 13). One result of the ambition for ‘queer’ to challenge capitalism and neoliberalism, as well as heteronormativity and patriarchy, is a series of startling neologisms — ‘tout peut être potentiellement queerisé’ (p. 14), ‘l’hétéropatriarcocapitalisme’ (p. 22), even, later, ‘espaces-temps […] antihétéropatriarcocapitalistes’ (p. 185) — but there is also a wish to underline the term’s intersectional relevance, and indeed the ethics it implies. The volume then includes twenty-four essays organized into six sections: ‘Corps et affects’; ‘Modes de vie’, ‘Espaces et temporalités’, ‘Biopolitique’, ‘Présenter/représenter’, and ‘Culture pop’. Subjects include works by established — indeed canonical — Québécois writers (Nelly Arcan, Marie-Claire Blais, Michel Tremblay) and lesser-known, for example Nicholas Giguère’s Queues (2017). Camp, depression, comedy and humour, incest, AIDS activism, the figure of the child, and the politics of ‘fat’ are all present. In the section on pop culture, Céline Dion is entertainingly and convincingly given the queer treatment. Xavier Dolan is taken to task for his reluctance to embrace the label (refusal of Cannes’s Queer Palm), while his œuvre, it becomes clear, passes the queer test. The editors acknowledge that the volume does not fully represent the cultural and ethnic diversity of Quebec. The essay on a cause célèbre in Quebec concerning blackface at times struggles to make the link with queer. That on the novel Ourse bleue (2007) by indigenous writer Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau raises some fascinating points both about Cree society’s alternative forms of subjectivation and white Québécois ambiguities regarding settler colonialism, but it also suggests that this volume may have missed opportunities not only to expand and multiply queer analysis to Quebec cultural artefacts and histories, but also to articulate the ways in which the specificities of ‘Quebecness’ — for example, its problematic relations to categories of majority/minority, colonizer/colonized, the ‘major’ configurations of the English language and standard French, as well as the ambiguous status of Montreal — might in fact contribute to, and enhance, the theoretical debates. Nonetheless, this is an important work which will be both a reference point and signpost to further discussion, confirming the idea that scholars working on gender and sexuality really need to take a close look at Quebec.

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