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This book investigates the lives and stories of queer Maghrebi and Maghrebi French men who moved to or grew up in contemporary France. It combines original French language data from my ethnographic fieldwork in France with a wide array of recent narratives and cultural productions including performance art and photography, films, novels, autobiographies, published letters, and other first-person essays to investigate how these queer men living in France and the diaspora stake claims to time and space, construct kinship, and imagine their own future. By closely examining empirical evidence from the lived experiences of these queer Maghrebi French-speakers, this book presents a variety of paths available to these men who articulate and pioneer their own sexual difference within their families of origin and contemporary French society. These sexual minorities of North African origin may explain their homosexuality in terms of a 2modern coming out3 narrative when living in France. Nevertheless, they are able to negotiate cultural hybridity and flexible language, temporalities, and filiations, that combine elements from a variety of discourses on family, honor, face-saving, the symbolic order of gender differences, gender equality, as well as the western and largely neoliberal constructs of individualism and sexual autonomy. --

In this book Denis M. Provencher examines the tensions between Anglo-American and French articulations of homosexuality and sexual citizenship in the context of contemporary French popular culture and first-person narratives. In the light of recent political events and the perceived hegemonic role of US forces throughout the world, an examination of the French resistance to globalization and 'Americanization', is timely in this context. He argues that contemporary French gay and lesbian cultures rely on long-standing French narratives that resist US models of gay experience. He maintains that French gay experiences are mitigated through (gay) French language that draws on several canonical voices - including Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre - and various universalistic discourses. Drawing on material from a diverse array of media, Queer French draws out the importance of a French gay linguistic and semiotic tradition that emerges in contemporary textual practices and discourses as they relate to sexual citizenship in 20th- and 21st-century France. It will appeal to an interdisciplinary readership in gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, linguistics, media and communication studies and French studies.

In this essay, I analyze the speech acts of Farid, a thirty-six year old self-identified same-sex desiring man from my fieldwork, who recounts his trajectory from growing up in Algiers and his eventual migration as an adult to Angers and then Paris. I illustrate how his queer Maghrebi French story in the diaspora does not resonate significantly with the "coming out" (Provencher 2007) or "arrival" narratives (Schehr 2009) of other queer French speakers in the city. Moreover, his speech acts do not heavily echo the "flexible language" (Leap 2003) or the language of queer diasporic speakers analyzed in other contexts (Decena 2011, Manalansan 2003). Furthermore, unlike other queer Maghrebi French interlocutors — who exploit their artistic crafts such as photography, filmmaking, and creative writing to pioneer new scripts or "performative encounters" (Rosello 2005) between France and the Maghreb — Farid struggles to tell a coherent story as he remains caught between the teleologies of the Maghrebi family in Algiers on the one hand and neoliberalism and its concomitant homonormativity in "gay" Paris on the other. The linguistic dimensions of Farid's impossible "je" [I] are evident in his use of statements that highlight the collective with the subject pronouns "we" and "they" as well as topic sentences that underscore subjects like "my family," "the country," and "my religion." At the same time, he draws on fragmented and unstable identities in a series of disconnected "je" statements, often with conditional clauses and modality shifts that highlight flux instead of the ego-centered, liberated, and individual subject who must learn to say "je" assuredly in the indicative tense in the late modern era. At times, he remains an "impossible subject" in an "impossible location" (Raissiguier 2010) unable to find financial and emotional stability almost three years after leaving Algiers and arriving in France where he fails to imagine a "queer future" for himself. Hence, this study illustrates how the celebration of chaos and subversion (for example, Halberstam's (2011) "queer art of failure") is not always readily available to subjects like Farid, who have not (yet) acquired the "flexible language" or the economic and cultural capital in an urban setting.

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.

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.

In this essay, I examine the pragmatic and social semiotic aspects of recent hate speech against French politicians and homosexuals. In part one I analyze the discourse surrounding the 2002 stabbing of Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë in which his assailant Azedine Berkane expressed dislike for 'politicians and homosexuals.' The French media and authorities generally did not frame this as a 'homophobic act' and ignored any potentially logical association between the two terms (i.e. 'politicians' and 'homosexuals'). In order to better understand his statement, I examine Berkane's act in relation to what other spectators and participants said about it both immediately following the event and sometime after its occurrence. In part two of the essay, I link Berkane's homophobic statement to a broader French semiotic system and set of textual practices including several examples of hate speech that occurred during an attack on Bègles mayor Noël Mamère. I analyze representative examples of hate speech received by Mamère when he performed the first and only gay marriage in France in 2004. By examining examples of hate speech from the 'Mamère Affair,' it is possible to gain a better understanding of the ideological underpinnings of Berkane's seemingly illogical statement in the 'Delanoë Affair'

Ernest Lavisse's 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 Lavisse's 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.