Rousseau in Drag Deconstructing Gender [Hardcover]

Through a series of close readings of most of Rousseau's major writings, this book provides a new interpretation of the eighteenth-century philosopher's sexual politics. The text argues that Rousseau's writings provide a critique of not only normative gender identity, but also normative familial and kinship relations.Sexual/Political Inequality The Arts: From the Letter to d'Alembertt o the Reveries of a Solitary Walker Postoedipal Desire: Reading the M?nage ? Trois Autobiography: Writing the Self, Writing Gender

Uncovering sides of Rousseau previously hidden in plain sight, Kennedy's Rousseau in Drag is one of the most exciting books I have read in a very long time. It explodes reigning conceptions of Rousseau's views on women and gender and will generate healthy debate for years to come. - Helena Rosenblatt, professor of History, The Graduate Center, CUNY

A bravura close-reading. In place of the blinkered proponent of patriarchy depicted in most of the literature on Rousseau, Kennedy brings to life a paragon of perverse desire a paradoxical and self-contradicting author whose texts belie a deep sexual ambivalence, in passages that are sometime wildly evocative of fluid identities and intimate relations outside of the traditional nuclear family. - James Miller, professor of Political Science and Liberal Studies, New School for Social Research

Rousseau in Drag delivers an exciting new perspective on the gender dynamics across Rousseau's oeuvre. Probing the Confessions, Julie, ?mile, and shorter essays, Kennedy's reading both complements and disrupts earlier feminist work on Rousseau by taking seriously his 'perverse' desires. Without reducing Rousseau's writings to his biography or psycho-biography, Kennedy interprets Rousseau's own sexual and performative proclivities as constituting a move beyond the gender binaries that he otherwise seems to reproduce at various points within his texts. - Lori Marso, author of (UnlcÀ