Ilana Eloit

Ilana Eloit is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality at the Institute of Gender Studies, Geneva School of Social Sciences, University of Geneva. Before joining the University of Geneva, she was lecturer (Première assistante) at the Center for Gender Studies of the University of Lausanne, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratoire d’Études de Genre et de Sexualité (LEGS) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She holds a PhD in Gender Studies from the London School of Economics, and she is a graduate from Sciences Po Paris.

Her interdisciplinary work brings together feminist, queer and postcolonial theories with historical and cultural analysis of feminist and lesbian movements in France and Switzerland. In her research, she investigates the epistemic and discursive conditions of production of feminist and LGBTQ political subjects, and exhumes “banished” histories from which to interrogate the conventional genealogies and blind spots of feminist history and theory. Her PhD thesis, Lesbian Trouble: Feminism, Heterosexuality and the French Nation (1970-1981) was supervised by Clare Hemmings and examined by Judith Butler and Rahul Rao who awarded the doctorate with no corrections.

Her work has been published in journals like Feminist Theory, 20&21, Cahiers du genre, Le Temps des Médias and Métropolitiques. She has also contributed to the Dictionnaire des féministes: France, XVIIIe-XXIe siècle (ed. Christine Bard, Presses Universitaires de France, 2017) and to the Encyclopédie critique du genre (ed. Juliette Rennes, La Découverte, 2021). She edited with Clare Hemmings the special issue “Haunting Feminism: Encounters with Lesbian Ghosts” published in Feminist Theory in 2019. She is the editor with Marta Segarra of the CNRS-led Dictionary of Gender in Translation.

Research fields

• LGBTQ studies
• Feminist, lesbian, queer and postcolonial theories
• Sociology of feminist and LGBTQ+ movements
• Queer historiography and affect studies
• French republicanism and politics of difference (gender, sexuality, race, class)
• Politics of cultural translation in gender studies