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Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb

2004; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3685410

1527-2095

Martine Antle, Jarrod Hayes,

Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender

Reviewed by: Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb Martine Antle Hayes, Jarrod. Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. 307. Scholarly investigations of gay and lesbian sexualities are practically nonexistent in French Studies. With the exception of the important work of Monique Wittig (who, incidentally, had to move to this side of the Atlantic to gain recognition), Gay and Lesbian Studies in France have emerged only toward the end of the 1990s, when Didier Eribon organized a colloquium focusing exclusively on Gender Studies at the Georges Pompidou Center (June 23-27, 1997). Ironically, the majority of scholars who published their articles in the conference proceedings (Les études gays et lesbiennes) were American scholars. If Gay and Lesbian Studies still remain marginalized in France and in French curricula in the US, they are further occulted in the context of Francophone Studies. Jarrod Hayes's Queer Nations is thus groundbreaking, precisely because it explores alternative sexualities in the Maghreb. Challenging the French heterocentric tradition and its attendant universalist principles, Hayes's study illuminates the relation between homosexuality and constructions of gender, racial, cultural and national identities. Hayes does not simply demonstrate that same-sex desire is omnipresent in the Francophone literary tradition; he also convincingly argues that sexual identities cannot be read in isolation from the national, linguistic, religious and cultural contexts in which they are produced. [End Page 159] In fact, as Hayes shows, the notion of the queer tirelessly haunts both the French nation and the Maghrebian countries that still bear the aftermath of postcolonial cultural hegemonies. The figure of the specter thus constitutes a key element in Hayes's reading of the queer nation: "There is a specter haunting the Maghrebian nation; it is a queer specter, the specter of queerness" (17). Moreover, the direct link that Hayes establishes between the category of "queer" and notions of nation, race and religion poses yet another challenge, this time to Gender Studies, a field that has also often been marginalized in France, as well as in the United States, and has not always taken into account notions of race. Hayes proposes judicious and well conceived readings of a wide corpus of Francophone texts including works by Tahar Ben Jelloun, Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, Leila Sebbar and Albert Memmi. Following the critical and theoretical path of Malek Chebel, Edward Said and Homi Bhabba, particularly the latter's important Nation and Narration (1990), Hayes's study is extremely well documented, annotated and is firmly grounded in contemporary postcolonial debates. This study also has the merit of analyzing texts such as Sebbar's Le pédophile et la maman: l'amour des enfants (1980), which have thus far been ignored by critics. Hayes takes on the controversial subject of cross-racial desire and sexual tourism to problematize Sebbar's query: "Je serais une mère pédophile?" He writes: Sebbar dislodges assumptions about the pedophile/sexual tourist and the pedophile as enemy of children and, therefore, as a parent's worst nightmare. She thus creates the possibility of a double-edged critical sword with which one can articulate a critique of sexual tourism without reinforcing the heterosexism of most such critiques and a critique of the colonial or neocolonial implications of some sexual encounters without the abjection of nonnormative sexualities in and of themselves. (41) Hayes's original and skillful reading of Ben Jelloun's Moha le fou, Moha le sage is equally remarkable. He articulates the complex and at times contradictory mechanisms of national identification for Arab and Jewish characters who, paradoxically, both consider Israel as a land of exile ("terre d'exil"): "Moha reverses the logic of Zionist discourse whereby Israel is the homeland and Promised Land. For Moché and Moha, Morocco is the homeland for Arabs and Jews, and, for Moroccan Jews, Israel is a land of exile" (55). Hayes returns to Ben Jelloun on several occasions throughout his study in order to demonstrate the extent to which the successive strategies of veiling and unveiling sexual identities bring forward a deep questioning of nation building in Maghrebian contexts: "Maghrebian writers. . . have used the notion of unveiling to describe narrative relations of secrets, of...