FREN303: Queer francophone identities (second version)

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 analysisone 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.

2018

This dissertation, Deviant Sexualities: Placing Sexuality in Post-'68 French Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Literature/Politics, argues that modern French sexual minority politics, whose origins can be traced back to the student and worker uprisings of May 1968, has largely been about the making, unmaking, and remaking of space. In it, I analyze the artistic, theoretical, and activist work of four 20th-and 21st-century French figures politically invested in matters of gay, lesbian, and/or queer sexuality. Tracking the spatial configuration and logic of these thinkers' political visions brings to the fore the underappreciated ways in which post-'68 French LGBTQ thought is responsive to and conditioned by the French nation-state's foundational principle of Republican universalism. The first chapter's examination of iconic gay liberationist leader Guy Hocquenghem's activism, theory of desire, and the motif of travel in his understudied novels brings to light the "hyper-pluralistic universalism" that animates his politics. The second chapter dispels radical lesbian and materialist feminist Monique Wittig's reputation as the advocate of a parochial lesbian separatism by turning to Wittig's fiction to clarify her vision for the abolition of hetero-patriarchy called for in her essays. The third chapter elucidates the trenchant critique of Republican universalism at the heart of Guillaume Dustan's highly controversial "gay ghetto" autofiction. The fourth and final chapter addresses the emergence in the late 1990s of queer theory, culture, and politics in France and the nationalistic, anti-American overtones of its notoriously hostile reception. In it, I argue that French queer feminist performance artist, writer, and activist Wendy Delorme's work and the reactions it has inspired reveals sexual minority politics to be a site where the forces of sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, and nationalism converge. the support, encouragement, expertise, and inspiration of a number of people. First and foremost, my utmost thanks go out to my advisor, Christy Wampole, for her attentive supervision, contagious commitment to feminist scholarship, and unwavering generosity with her time, kindness and insight. It would be difficult to overstate my gratitude to Nick Nesbitt for his mentorship from my very first days on campus. During my time at Princeton, I have benefited immensely from the wisdom and critical acumen of Gayle Salamon, Wendy Belcher, Katie Chenoweth, Göran Blix, and Heather Love, whose seminar on queer and feminist method forever changed the way I approach scholarly research. I would also like to thank Lucien Nouis and Emily Apter, who fostered my appreciation for French literature and feminist theory during my undergraduate years at New York University and encouraged me to pursue graduate study.

French Studies

Queering French studies? How to consider the relation between queer theory and French intellectual culture? It is widely known that the theoretical origins of American theorists such as Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and David Halperin lie in French thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Monique Wittig, and Jacques Derrida. But it is also widely known that American queer thought made its intellectual way back to France in turn. A 2012 special issue of Paragraph was titled Queer Theory's Return to France, and editors Oliver Davis and Hector Kollias describe 'the return of a native'. 1 That return, however, was met with resistance, a result of traditional disciplinarity in the French university system and, more broadly, of republican universalism which tends to discourage identity-drive research or thinking. The Franco-American (dis)connection in queer theory is so complicated that it has become an object of study unto itself. Cornelia Möser considers that 'if there is such a thing as a "French queer", its particularity could be seen in the peculiar situation created by theoretical travelling between the US and France'. 2 Bruno Perreau studies the cultural and academic French response to queer theory at length, focusing on the intellectual movement as 'the object of reinterpretations, accretions, and deletions that continually redefine its contextual meaning'. 3 To talk of a French reception is not really possible 'due to the great plasticity of the way queer theory is used and to the mosaic-like nature of queer theory itself '. 4 What can be studied-as Perreau himself does so beautifully-is 'the complex relationship to identity and the fantasies that arise from the idea of American culture'. 5 The manner in which queer studies travels back and forth across the Atlantic, in ways that cannot necessarily be easily documented or even traced, in the end leaves the field intellectually hybrid-neither 'American' nor 'French'. Most visibly, the important work of Sam Bourcier (especially the three volumes titled Queer Zones) has been taken as a kind of Franco-American queer theory that

Queer(y)ing Bodily Norms in Francophone Culture, 2021

This is the pre-review and pre-formatted version of our introduction to Queer(y)ing Bodily Norms in Francophone Culture. Queer(y)ing Bodily Norms in Francophone Culture questions how a wide selection of restrictive norms come to bear on the body, through a close analysis of a range of texts, media and genres originating from across the francophone world and spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Each essay troubles hegemonic, monolithic perceptions and portrayals of racial, class, gender, sexual and/or national identity, rethinking bodily norms as portrayed in literature, film, theatre and digital media specifically from a queer and querying perspective. The volume thus takes «queer(y)ing» as its guiding methodology, an approach to culture and society which examines, questions and challenges normativity in all of its guises. The term «queer(y)ing» retains the celebratory tone of the term «queer» but avoids appropriating the identity of the LGBTQ+ community, a group which remains marginalized to this day. The publication reveals that evaluating the bodily norms depicted in francophone culture through a queer and querying lens allows us to fragment often oppressive and restrictive norms, and ultimately transform them.