Denis M. Provencher

Coming Out à l'oriental: Maghrebi-French Performances of Gender, Sexuality, and Religion

In this article, I examine issues of gender, sexuality, and religion for North African (Maghrebi)-French men in contemporary France. I introduce performance artist-photographer “2Fik,” one of the Maghrebi-French research subjects from my 2010 fieldwork, and examine excerpts of his particular coming out story to his parents and situate it in relation to recent work on homosexuality in the housing projects of Frances banlieues [suburban neighborhoods] (Chaumont, 2009; Naït-Balk, 2009). The interviewees narrative interweaves a variety of discourses and imagery that help distinguish his experience from those found in those publications as well as in recent scholarship on sexuality, citizenship, and transnationalism (Cruz-Malavé & Manalansan, 2000; Hayes, 2000; Leap & Boellstorff, 2004; Patton & Sánchez-Eppler, 2000; Provencher, 2007a). I argue that 2Fiks story and photography provide him a unique voice that draws on feminist and queer perspectives—informed by both reformed Islam and contemporary Western values—to “decline” (Rosello, 1998) and rewrite longstanding stereotypes of Islam in France. In fact, by acting as a “citizen-photographer” (Möller, 2010), 2Fik successfully declines stereotypes including the absent Muslim father, the veiled woman, and the symbolic violence associated with heteronormativity and traditional masculinity in Maghrebi-French families.

Tracing Sexual Citizenship and Queerness in Drôle de Félix (2000) and Tarik el hob (2001)

Sexual citizens of Maghrebi (North-African) descent are absent from a variety of real-life and representational spaces in twenty-first century France. Flipping through a recent issue of any gay French magazine—such as Têtu or PréfMag—will give the pointed reader a sense of this hyper-invisibility of gay Maghrebi-French citizens in mainstream consumer culture. Strolling through the Marais and other ‘‘gay-friendly’’ French neighborhoods may offer a slightly different picture as Maghrebi-French sexual citizens wander in and out of these spaces. Nevertheless, recent press articles, television broadcasts, and scholarship suggest that many of these citizens do not feel safe in or connected to these sites of same-sex leisure, desire, and consumption. For example, in my previous ethnographic work on sexuality and space, Samir, a young self-identified ‘‘French-Arab’’ drew a map of ‘‘gay Paris’’ in which he omitted completely the heart of the city (i.e. arrondissements 1 through 4 including the Marais) and spoke of his preference for more ‘‘mixed neighborhoods’’ (Provencher, Queer French 184–191). Gay Maghrebi-French citizens like Samir express varying degrees of marginalization or sexual objectification in gay-specific sites of citycenter where French sexual citizens of European descent congregate. This form of objectification is also aggravated by the commercial success of highly sexualized images of virile ‘‘Arabs,’’ Maghrebis, and ‘‘Beurs,’’ propagated by the pornography industry in France. A visit to the adult-video section of any gay-oriented French bookstore, video store, or website will assure the consumer of the hyper-sexualized visibility of these citizens in exploitative spaces on the margins where they fall under a persistent dominant (gay) male gaze (Cervulle).

Mapping Gay Paris: Language, Space and Sexuality in the Marais

This essay draws from a larger ethnographic study conducted in France where I interviewed forty gay men and lesbians about their ‘‘coming-out’’ experience. As part of the interview, I asked participants to imagine ‘‘gay city’’ (‘‘la ville gay’’) and draw a map of it for a gay or lesbian foreign visitor. In the analysis that follows, I briefly examine maps drawn by Paris-based gay men to illustrate how they visually and linguistically delineate sexual identity on Paris’ urban landscape and specifically in ‘‘le Marais.’’ I also discuss how their drawings exemplify the tension between the largely Anglo-American practice of naming sexual identity and related notions of ‘‘identity’’ and ‘‘community’’ and the French refusal to name and the related republican notions of anti-particularism and integration.

The Nation According to Lavisse Teaching Masculinity and Male Citizenship in Third-Republic France

Ernest Lavisses Histoire de France: Cours élémentaire (1884) was one of the most widely used history textbooks among French school children during the Third Republic. Le Petit Lavisse is replete with gender lessons that encourage French schoolboys to reflect on their identity and invigorate them with national pride following defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. In this essay, we examine representations of masculinityand male citizenship in Lavisses manual to illustrate how male ‘codes of honor’ (Nye, 1993) and a male ‘sex in mourning’ (Corbin, 1992) function in this republican project of nation rebuilding. In contrast to previous scholarship, we illustrate how Lavisse situates both his male and female heroes in these nineteenth-century discourses on honour, masculinity and citizenship. In sum, we expose the inherently male-centred nature of the pedagogy of the Third Republic prescribed by Lavisse and others.

Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed’s performance of universal French citizenship and good Muslim brotherhood

This article builds on scholarship in performance studies, anthropology, discourse analysis and French studies by examining the performative speech acts of self-identified Maghrebi-French queer men from my recent fieldwork in France. As a point of departure, I draw on José Estaban Muñoz’s notion of ‘disidentification’ (1999) and Mireille Rosello’s notion of ‘declining the stereotype’ (1998) to examine the strategies of resistance for Maghrebi-French queer speakers who ‘work on and against dominant ideology’ and who try ‘to transform cultural logic from within’ a dominant system of identification and assimilation (Muñoz, 1999: 11–12). In my analysis, I examine an interview with one of my Maghrebi-French interlocutors, Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, founder of several French associations including Homosexuels musulmans de France (HM2F), and the author of Le Coran et la chair (2012), to show how his speech acts function simultaneously from within contemporary France – and its notion of laïcité – and from within Islam and the Prophet’s own dynamic approach to the Quran, to reinvent both the ‘universal French citizen’ and the ‘good Muslim brother’. Zahed’s story will help us to see how sexual and religious minorities must ‘straddle competing cultural traditions, memories, and material conditions’ and devise ‘a configuration of possible scripts of self/selves that shift according to the situation’ (Manalansan, 2003: x) in order to be heard in contemporary France by their families of origin, their fellow citizens and their Muslim brothers and sisters.

The linguistic representation of femininity and masculinity in Jean Genet's Notre-Dame des Fleurs:

Address for correspondence: Dr Denis M. Provencher, Department of Foreign Languages, 315 Graff Main Hall, University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, La Crosse, WI 54601. E-mail: provench.deni@uwlax.edu. Jean Genet is both praised and reviled for his raw depiction of the arbitrary nature of how masculine and feminine roles are reproduced in a homosexual society. Kate Millet chose to close her groundbreaking book of feminist literary criticism, Sexual Politics (1975), with a chapter dedicated to the writings of Jean Genet who she claimed was the ’only living writer of firstclass literary gift to have transcended the sexual myths of our era’.1 For Millet, Genet’s works magnificently illustrated that the terms ’masculine’ and ’feminine’ do not refer to biologically determined categories but social roles:

Stepping back from queer theory: Language, fieldwork and the everyday in sexuality studies in France

In a 2012 special issue of French Cultural Studies, Didier Eribon urges French studies scholars to step back from critical theory, and in particular queer theory as it has emerged in cultural and literary studies. He is also particularly critical of a version of queer theory conjugated with psychoanalysis. For Eribon, cultural studies scholars and those working in sexuality studies should move away from the ‘master narrative’ of the family and (re)turn to the cultural, the social, the field and empirical evidence. Over the last 15 years, I have conducted fieldwork and ethnographic interviews with self-identified same-sex desiring men in France. Their life stories can be read at times through the Anglo-American lens of a gay-identified, Western coming-out narrative with a telos of ‘progress’ that involves moving from the closet to being ‘out’. At the same time, however, a queer linguistic approach can help us to read against the grain of several norms and hence provide us with a broader understanding of their lived experiences. In this essay, I present empirical language data from my interview with ‘Tahar’ one of my self-identified same-sex desiring Maghrebi and Maghrebi-French interlocutors to illustrate how his speech acts are situated at the crossroads of multiple discourses, temporalities, identities and traditions. As we shall see, Tahar’s story involves being ‘beur’, ‘being homosexual’ and ‘being fat’. This subject speaks back against the empire, against heteronormativity, and against corporeal norms. While a postcolonial critique based on a ‘postcolonial identity’ (looking at ethnicity or religion, for example) or a linguistic analysis based on ‘gay identity’ could be helpful here, my point is that a queer linguistic analysis – one that takes a position counter to the normative broadly defined by considering simultaneously multiple subaltern subject positions – could provide a better approach for those of us working in an interdisciplinary French cultural studies context.

Introduction: Maghrebi-French Sexualities

This special issue of Modern & Contemporary France focuses on Maghrebi-French cultures and sexualities in contemporary France. It began as a series of papers presented as part of the conference panel ‘Intimate Sexual Spaces in Maghrebi-French Cultures’ at the Twentiethand Twenty-first Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium hosted by the University of Guelph (Canada) in 2010. Subsequent discussions and collaborations have now given rise to the following collection of essays that aim to ‘decline’ (Rosello 1998) several stereotypes related to the sexualities ofMaghrebi-Frenchmen and womenwho live their lives at the crossroads of different cultural, religious, and ideological traditions. By using sexuality through the analytical lenses of feminist, queer, post-colonial and political-economic theories, among others, we aim to expose the largely heteronormative nature of the ‘sexually democratic’ (Fassin and Surkis 2010) or ‘modern’ French state and its anti-immigration policies that go hand in hand with the policing of ‘archaic’ sexualities. By focusing on French citizens of North African descent, we draw attention to issues that are of particular importance to these post-colonial communities. Nevertheless, the politics of the state and the policing of sexualities in a ‘secular republic’ have consequences for all French citizens regardless of their cultural, religious, linguistic, or other background. During the Industrial Revolution and throughout the Trentes Glorieuses, several waves of European (i.e. Polish, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese) populations migrated to France and faced their own forms of exclusion. North Africans migrated in large numbers to France at the height of the Trente Glorieuses and during the economic crisis of the 1970s, and have experienced and continue to experience markedmarginalization on linguistic, religious, cultural, economic, and spatial levels. One of the symptoms of their marginalization is that they are alleged to be more inassimilables than the aforementioned waves of immigrants (Noiriel 1988; Durmelat and Swamy 2011). Moreover, Islam has been depicted repeatedly as unchangeable and incompatible with

French Gay Modernism (review)

where a more concrete understanding of experience is illuminated. If the truth of experience remains an abstraction, then it risks repeating the reifying gestures that Adorno and Benjamin worried about in Kant and, of course, in the social world. Andrew J. Taggart University of Wisconsin-Madison Notes 1. See Peter Hohendahl, “Introduction: Adorno Studies Today,” New German Critique 56 (Spring – Summer 1992): 3-15. 2. Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Back to Adorno,” Telos 81 (Fall 1989): 13.

Albert Cohen: Dissonant Voices (review)

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies The last contribution to this collection of studies, “Thomas Mann and Jewry: A Collage,” by Thomas Klugkist, offers what seems to be a complete compendium of passages in the author’s fiction, non-fiction, diaries, radio speeches, and personal correspondence pertinent to the general topic. The list would be helpful to anybody doing research in this area. What I found lacking in this volume is an examination of the influence Thomas Mann’s wife, Katia Pringsheim, had on Mann’s thinking about Jews in general. To be sure, Pringsheim was not only a secular Jew but also an assimilated one. She came from a wealthy family and supported her husband in many important ways. There is no doubt that Mann was depicting their relationship, at least its beginnings, in his “fairytale” novel Königliche Hoheit (“Royal Highness”), and perhaps any attempt to show how Katia Mann influenced her husband with regard to Judentum would turn out to be nothing more than an exercise in amassing detail to support what is already generally known. But Mann tirelessly recorded the details of his life for posterity, and an investigation of his experience of Jewishness on this most intimate level would hardly seem irrelevant. When ambivalence is the last word that can be said in any discussion of the topic, detail becomes important. George Bridges University of Idaho