Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

Introduction

Published in French in 1999 as Réflexions sur la question gay – the title echoes Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive – and in English in 2004, the book has three parts. The first describes how an insulting word shapes gay subjectivity before one has words of one’s own, and how many gay men remake themselves by moving to cities and building networks and a culture of their own. The second reconstructs a literary and intellectual history of homosexuality from Oscar Wilde and André Gide to Marcel Proust. The third rereads Michel Foucault, whose biography Eribon had written in 1989, arguing that his work on madness and sexuality can be read as a response to the experience of subjection.

Connections

Builds on

• The Will to Knowledge (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1)1976 · Michel Foucault

More works by Didier Eribon

• 2009Returning to Reims