1. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 17.
2. Monique Wittig, ‘Paradigm’, in George Stambolian and Elaine Marks (eds), Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts, Critical Texts (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 114–21, this quotation p. 114.
3. Monique Wittig, ‘Paradigm’, in George Stambolian and Elaine Marks (eds), Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts, Critical Texts (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 114–21, this quotation p. 114.
4. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 101.
5. Katherine Ganz has posed the question of whether a place at the table of French queer theory can be found for Rachilde in her article ‘The Difficult Guest: French Queer Theory Makes Room for Rachilde’, South Central Review, 22:31 (2005), 13–32. Ganz focuses mainly on Rachilde’s ‘disaggregation’ of sex and gender in Monsieur Venus to make her argument for including Rachilde in the queer French canon. Similarly, Diana Holmes calls Rachilde ‘Butlerian avant la lettre’, but does not pursue this insight beyond her observation of the gender inversion visible in Rachilde’s novels’ titles (Diana Holmes, Rachilde: Decadence, Gender and the Woman Writer (Oxford: Berg, 2001), p. 3).