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R oland Barthes, 1915-1980, was and remains a major figure in literary theory. Courses in literary theory all over the world inevitably include works by Barthes. Several are absolute monuments: his 1957 Mythologies is a powerful precursor text for cultural studies; his 1968 essay "The Death of the Author" is always cited by anyone thinking about authorship; his 1970 book S/Z continues to be used as an exhaustive model for literary critical practice. And then there is my own personal favorite-the 1973 volume, The Pleasure of the Text.
This little book, published while I was a graduate student, meant the world to me at the time. It authorized my own push out of distantiated, scholarly discourse into something more embodied. I have written about this book repeatedly. In the mid-1980s, I wrote about it more than once in relation to feminism.1 In my most recent book, I wrote about how Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text asserts his desire for the author, always there, lost in the middle of the text. While I was mainly focused on what Barthes says about the author, rereading The Pleasure of the Text for the first time in the twenty-first century, I also remarked something else.
Barthes's 1973 book is an affirmation of the reader's perversity. While I have known this since my first reading in the mid-1970s, it took on somewhat different connotations thirty years later. Under the banner of "perverse" or "perverted" (the French word, pervers, can be translated by either), Barthes in 1973 outlines and advocates an antinormative, anti-institutional erotics; thirty years later, we might call the reader's perversity, the reader's perversion, "queer."2 Reading The Pleasure of the Text for the first time since the advent of queer theory, I found myself thinking that this book, which theorizes reading based in perversion, might represent the most successful instance of a queer theory of literature, a queer literary theory.3
When, about five years ago, I rediscovered The Pleasure of the Text as a celebration of perversion, I began to fantasize teaching it not as literary theory but as a theory of sexuality. This fantasy has taken a number of different forms: a course on Barthes's theory of sexuality where we read a lot of his books;...