Bruno Perreau

Bruno Perreau

Perreau at MIT WGS Intellectual Forum in June 2012
Born December 15, 1976
Burgundy, France
Nationality French

Bruno Perreau (PhD, Paris I Sorbonne) is the Cynthia L. Reed Associate Professor of French Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Non-Resident Faculty at the Center for European Studies, Harvard.

For ten years, he has taught Political Science, Gender and Queer Studies at Sciences Po, where he opened a course on gay politics with professor Françoise Gaspard in 2006. Bruno Perreau was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) in 2007-2008, a Newton Fellow in Sociology and a Jesus College Research Associate at the University of Cambridge from 2011 to 2014. In 2014-2015, he was a Fellow at Stanford Humanities Center.

Perreau’s research investigates how the law is manufactured in contemporary Western societies. How are juridical categories instituted and, once they are, why do they seem so obvious? While the law is often thought of as nothing more than a technique, Perreau explores its social, political, and aesthetic foundations: what conditions have to be in place for a policy to be successful and become law? His work shows that “nature” is one of the main registers undergirding the manufacture of law today: law is often thought to do no more than translate natural distinctions among individuals (whether based on sex, age, race, or sexual orientation) but also among individuals and things (through the notion of property, ethical oversight on interventions on the human body, or the control of reproduction). Western societies have thus built an imaginary construction of nature under whose light our relation to community is elaborated, a relation commonly designated as “culture.” Perreau maintains that Western societies think culture as if it were a “second nature.” Starting with an epistemological line of enquiry, Perreau’s research has very concrete repercussions. He asks how have our daily lives been marked by this imaginary construction of nature, whether in terms of our nationality, our relations to family, our social tastes or our identities?

The Politics of Adoption

In France, the process for authorizing an adoption is understood as a “moment of truth” over the course of which administrative categories and social identities enter into a confrontation. Gender is a crucial aspect of this encounter, and the decision to accept or reject an application (by a single man, a woman past menopause, a homosexual person, a married couple, etc.) gives insight into what constitutes a legitimate family in France. To understand how the production of the family and the production of the state are linked, The Politics of Adoption offers a study of parliamentary debates since 1945 alongside French and European case law. It also casts light on social work through a statistical analysis of the different types of justification offered by child social welfare agents when surveyed on the topic of homosexual people who apply for adoption. Perreau’s contention is that adoption policies evidence a pastoral power: candidates are not evaluated for what they are but for what they should be. The state is considered as a guide for its citizens who wish to become parents because the state needs them to produce young citizens who fully acknowledge its authority. According to philosopher Judith Butler, Perreau offers "a way of understanding adoption policy as no less than a way of rearticulating political modernity."

Queer Theory in France

Perreau's most recent research discusses various facets of the French response to queer theory, from the mobilization of activists and the seminars of scholars to the emergence of queer media and translations. It sheds new light on recent events around gay marriage in France, where opponents to the 2013 law saw queer theory as a threat to French family. Perreau questions the return of French Theory to France from the standpoint of queer theory and the polemics over marriage and kinship, thereby exploring the way France conceptualizes America. By examining mutual influences across the Atlantic, he seeks to reflect on changes in the idea of national identity in France and the United States, offering insight on recent attempts to theorize the notion of “community” in the wake of Maurice Blanchot's work.

Books

Edited Books

Editorial Responsibilities

Website

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