In his scintillating volume, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction, Malcolm Bowie writes of the ‘profoundly unsettling view of human sexuality enshrined’ in the later volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu. Bowie writes wonderfully about the narrator's attachment to Albertine:

Bowie traces the relation between interpretation and desire in this long novel, responding to the two as interminable, and infinitely involved with one another. Looking beyond previous critical attempts to locate Albertine and define her sexuality, Bowie reminds us that ‘Albertine's sexuality remains an enigma’. He continues: ‘Albertine cannot be known, unless this interminable passage from structure to structure is itself knowledge and our other notions of what it is to know are the products of a lingering infantile wish for comfort or mastery.’

It has now long been recognised that literary and cultural studies in France have felt the impact of queer studies and of theoretical investigations of gender, pursued in the USA and UK, only latterly.