Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Sexual object-choice is one of the principal self-confirming parameters defining social identity in Western societies and puts the focus away from practising homosexuality to being homosexual or gay. Many Western countries have decriminalised same-sex sexuality and some have granted it full equal legal status. In the last two decades, aided by gay tourism, satellite television, and global media, the dominant Western-style gay way of life, which makes being exclusively gay one’s social identity, has also disrupted prevailing notions of gender and sexuality in the Maghreb. Young male Maghrebis often can conceive of themselves as gay only by being Westernised and by renouncing their cultural heritage. At the same time, LGBT+ rights organisations have increasingly agitated for an emancipation of sexual outcasts outside the West. This paper will explore how Maghrebi writers of fiction, sandwiched between the use of the French language—providing access to a Western audience—and the reality of Muslim-majority locales, have reacted to this import of a different cultural discourse on sexuality. Various contemporary representatives of Maghrebi literature in French have mediated a homosexual reality in their fiction and the Muslim closet in which it is set while crucially picturing it from the first-person perspective. Indeed, the frequently unstable Maghrebi subjectivities staged in many of these narratives deconstruct the post-independence homophobic official discourses of the North African nation-states and the traditional segregation of the sexes but also the polarised hetero- and homonormative identitary discourses which hail from the West and segregate not sexes but sexual orientations.