Childhood, Trauma, and Transformation: What We Can Learn from Didier Eribon’s Retour à Reims.

Didier Eribon is one of France’s leading sociologists and queer theorists, most famous for his 1991 autobiography of Michel Foucault and his pioneering 1999 Refléxions sur la question gay. In 2009, he published the autofictional memoir Retours à Reims in which, for the first time in his public career, Eribon attempted to reckon with his working-class roots and consider how they had affected his relationship with queerness growing up. Contributor Jude Jones reflects on the lessons that this literary self-dissection can teach us, considering the broader personal and political implications of the queer project of self-revelation, (re)discovery, and reinvention that are laid out in the book.