Specializing in Francophone Caribbean, African, and New World literatures and cultures, Professor Couti examines how the notion of local knowledge in the colonial and post-colonial eras has shaped the literatures and awareness of self in former colonies through what she terms a ‘Sexual Edge’ – a sharp violent representation of sexuality as a societal construction. She has published articles on women writers, on questions of diasporic identities, memory, and exile as well as on issues of nationhood, sexuality, gender, and violence.

Her first book project Dangerous Creole Liaisons considers the ways in which white and black French Caribbean writers represent sexed female bodies and sexual difference to advance their political ideologies, often hoping to vindicate one outlook over others. In so doing, they deploy a cunning rhetoric of victimization that white creole authors first put into place in the 19th century and that black writers re-appropriated in the 20th century. She examines various texts, which construct ideas of the nation that do not merely revolve around the usual metaphors of the motherland or Mère-patrie but rather around illicit liaisons and sexual subordination. 

Her second book project Sex, Sea, and Self offers a re-reading of the relevance of black authors at the beginning of the twentieth century. This revaluation covers male and female authors of color who, for their own political, cultural, and personal ends, reject or reproduce the (largely white) metropolitan and Creole exotic colonial mythology that surrounds Creole women and Creole sexual stereotypes such as the doudou (mulatto women as tantalizing objects of desire). 

She examines the literary appropriation of eroticized images of bodies for the promotion and propagation of identity politics and nationalistic awareness in former French colonies from the Caribbean and West Africa. Questioning, for instance, erotic and sexualized figures such as the doudou (French Antillean exotic object of desire) or the kokeur (oversexed womanizer) she explores notions of self, gender, race and ethnicity as social and national constructs, which present the creole body as a reflection of colonial and postcolonial societies. For that purpose, she studies first masculine discourse and then feminine response to this patriarchal framing of  identity, self and culture .