The most recent issue of differences, “Transatlantic Gender Crossings,” edited by Anne Emmanuelle Berger and Éric Fassin, addresses French and US feminism, gender, and queer theory.
As much as French feminism influenced the establishment of women’s studies in U.S. universities, so has U.S. gender and queer theory marked the French intellectual and academic landscape. For this reason, gender and sexuality studies have been bound up from the beginning with specific intractable questions of internationalization. Has internationalization contributed to an “Americanization” of the field, or has it allowed for different ways of understanding the connections between the local and the global, the center and the periphery? And how might institutionalization and internationalization affect our thinking about the political and theoretical intersections between gender and sexuality or between sex and race? Contributors from Europe and the United States consider theoretical, political, and institutional questions raised by the transatlantic exchange of feminist theories over four decades.
Topics in this issue include hospitality, queer/feminist difference and displacement, and the institutionalization of gender studies and the pluralization of feminism.