Frieda Ekotto

Lou Lootgieter's collection "Les Dessous lesbiens de la littérature" (2026) presents a deliberately subjective, non-chronological mapping of lesbian writing styles through 29 Francophone texts from the 19th century onwards, combining journalistic research, interviews, and close readings. At its core are recurring strategies through which female authors articulate lesbian desire under conditions of censorship and invisibility. For instance, Lootgieter reads Rachilde's "Monsieur Vénus" (1884) as an early figuration of „monstrosity“ as a cipher for still-unspeakable desire, while interpreting Monique Wittig's "L’Opoponax" (1964) as the grammatical neutralization of gender as a literary „Trojan horse.“ Using examples such as Amélie Nothomb's "Stupeur et tremblements" (1999), whose homoerotic tension was ignored by contemporary criticism, or Violette Leduc's censored boarding school narrative "Thérèse et Isabelle," the volume demonstrates how strongly reception and publication history contribute to making lesbian writing invisible. At the same time, the perspective shifts over the course of the four chapters from techniques of obfuscation to open political positions, as seen in Constance Debré's "Love Me Tender" (2020), which explicitly rejects heterosexuality as a social regime. Theoretical references—from Judith Butler and Monique Wittig to Paul B. Preciado—remain deliberately fragmentary and are used more as a space for resonance than as a systematic framework. Furthermore, the relationship with male homosexuality, intra-feminist lines of conflict, and questions of trans inclusion and exclusion are also selectively negotiated alongside these themes. The review highlights these tensions between a wealth of material and a lack of methodological synthesis, as well as the collection's value as a resource of previously marginalized texts, reception documents, and conversational perspectives for future literary scholarship.