Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (review)

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.