Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon

Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon

A memoir and a meditation on individual and class identity, and the forces that keep us locked in political closets.

On thinking the matter through, it doesn't seem exaggerated to assert that my coming out of the sexual closet, my desire to assume and assert my homosexuality, coincided within my personal trajectory with my shutting myself up inside what I might call a class closet.
--from Returning to Reims

After his father dies, Didier Eribon returns to his hometown of Reims and rediscovers the working-class world he had left behind thirty years earlier. For years, Eribon had thought of his father largely in terms of the latter's intolerable homophobia. Yet his father's death provokes new reflection on Eribon's part about how multiple processes of domination intersect in a given life and in a given culture. Eribon sets out to investigate his past, the history of his family, and the trajectory of his own life. His story weaves together a set of remarkable reflections on the class system in France, on the role of the educational system in class identity, on the way both class and sexual identities are formed, and on the recent history of French politics, including the shifting voting patterns of the working classes--reflected by Eribon's own family, which changed its allegiance from the Communist Party to the National Front.

Returning to Reims is a remarkable book of sociological inquiry and critical theory, of interest to anyone concerned with the direction of leftist politics in the contemporary world, and to anyone who has ever experienced how sexual identity can clash with other parts of one's identity. A huge success in France since its initial publication in 2009, Returning to Reims received enthusiastic reviews in Le Monde, Libération, L'Express, Les Inrockuptibles, and elsewhere.

Eribon, Didier: - Didier Eribon, Professor of Sociology at the University of Amiens, is well known for his groundbreaking biography, Michel Foucault, first published in 1989. He is also the author of Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, as well as numerous other books of critical theory.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781584351238
ISBN 10	1584351233
Title	Returning to Reims
Author	Didier Eribon
Series	Semiotext Foreign Agents
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Autonomedia
Year published	2013-09-13
Number of pages	256
Prizes	Commended for Lambda Literary Awards (Gay Memoir/Biography) 2014
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.