Title: Infiltrating culture
First published: 1996
Description: The infiltrator may be a foreigner, a spy, a child, a cleaner, a woman. Like Donna Haraway's cyborg or Michel Serres' parasite, the figure of the infiltrator offers a powerful new way of articulating cultural difference and cultural practice. Issues of gender, race and age are all addressed in a subtle and forceful close reading of a series of texts - from Claire Bretecher's sharp-edged cartoons to Colette's recipes, from the diary of a Martinican cleaning lady to the James Bond thrillers.

Mireille Rosello's analysis explodes the notion of binary oppositions: the insider/outsider, black/white, straight/queer, rich/poor, solid/fluid. The infiltrator, she argues, is an ambivalent figure, one who penetrates a closed territory only to expose the fantasy upon which power relations are founded.

Rosello's lucid and passionate engagement with theories of multiculturalism and hybridity marks this as a major step forward in the field of cultural theory. As a critique of power, it is a seminal text and will be impossible to ignore.
Subjects: French literature, History and criticism, National characteristics, French, in literature, Feminism in literature, Identity (Psychology) in literature, Nationale identiteit, Feminisme, Letterkunde, Frans, Französisch, Frauenliteratur, Kulturelle Identität, Schriftstellerin, French literature, history and criticism, 20th century, National characteristics in literature
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PQ307.I54 R67 1996