The playful capacity of camp rhetoric to both mock the status quo and appropriate it for its own queer imagination is crucial to Cusset's analysis. He sees queer criticism as a break from the stuffy methodology of traditional literary criticism and instead champions the formation of an individual relationship with the text ... Even for the uninitiated, this book serves as a scintillating baptism by fire for all aspiring queer Francophiles making their first trek into the French literary canon.
-Lambda Literary

Francois Cusset is an elegant, playful, occasionally outrageous writer ... [He shows] a flair for boisterous, intellectual tomfoolery.
-subTerrain

One of the things I found most fascinating about the book was Cusset's take on what makes a work of literature queer. Rather than focusing on what is explicitly queer such as the actual acts of sodomy or lesbian affection, Cusset says that being queer is about the loss of the self, "the art of being where nothing awaits you" and that "the queer approach... loudly proclaims lack of definition as its major virtue." ... Altogether a highly intriguing text.
-qPDX.com

Imagine that a French theorist takes Judith Butler's Gender Trouble-itself a landmark 'translation' (in the loose sense) of French feminist philosophy and theory-and re-translates it back into a French context, and you will begin to glean where François Cusset is coming from in The Inverted Gaze. Cusset is above all a cultural translator of the transatlantic sex and gender debates unfolding over the last thirty years. Homo, hetero, neuter, neutral, gay, queer, trans-all these Anglo-American terms and many more are newly refracted in Cusset's brainy sexathon.
-Emily Apter, New York University

The Inverted Gaze is a guide to the more sexually daring exploration of the human condition as it unfolds in French literature through the ages.
-Windy City News