Stepping back from queer theory: Language,fieldwork and the everyday in sexuality studies in France

Introduction

Really imaginative ethnographies … depend upon an unknowing relation to the other. To begin an ethnographic project with a goal, with an object of research and a set of presumptions, is already to stymie the process of discovery; it blocks one’s ability to learn something that exceeds the frameworks with which one enters. (Halberstam, 2011: 12)

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. Many of the journal’s readers are probably now familiar with the well-rehearsed work in gender performativity (Butler, 1990) and queerness (Warner, 1999): (a) gender identity being an iterative process that exists on the body’s surface repeated over time to congeal, to become recognisable as natural or normal; and (b) ‘queer’ which can be used as an adjective, noun or most forcefully today as a verb to debunk, subvert or question norms including heteronormativity and homonormativity (Warner, 1999; Duggan, 2003). Eribon’s critique is, for example, that queer theory is overly invested in the pursuit of ‘la liberté sexuelle’, and ‘le chemin vers l’émancipation personnelle’ where the individual is taught to stay on the ‘straight and narrow path’ of the ‘subversive’ by remaining outside the mainstream (Eribon, 2012: 154). He contends that such theory-driven scholarship also tends to pathologise the cultural practices of marriage and adoption, and to dismiss the possibility of alterity emerging from within such ‘normative’ and bourgeois cultural practices. For Eribon, queer theory is an often highly privileged posturing that is both too utopian and too myopic in its universalising mission because it does not account for the material conditions or the individual agency of (sexual) citizens who live and even thrive at the crossroads of multiple identities, discourses, temporalities and traditions. ¹ It assumes that subversion must emerge solely from outside the established system.

Eribon is also particularly critical of a version of queer theory conjugated with psychoanalysis. ² He questions the relevance of the symbolic order of gender differences, the ever-powerful phallus, castration, the name of the father and the Oedipal complex for LGBT citizens: he draws attention to what he calls the structural homophobia and pseudo-scientific ideologies of psychoanalysis. ³ He writes for example:

C’est parce qu’elle nous fait croire qu’elle est une Science qui décrit les principes de l’accès de l’enfant à la culture et au langage, bref, au statut de sujet humain – le principe fondamental étant celui de la ‘différence des sexes’ – que cette idéologie pseudo-scientifique peut imposer sa politique. (Eribon, 2005: 43)

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, le champ, le terrain, and he believes that theorists such as Deleuze, Foucault, Bourdieu and Wittig, who, although they are not for the most part empirically driven, can help us to acquire a more nuanced understanding of sexualities. In contrast to the family unit, he also points to the school (the formative space for the child; the mill of French republican citizenship) as a site where we can better raise our children and educate the next generations. I will return to the notion of child (and habitus) below.

Indeed, Eribon’s argument is part of a growing body of criticism in sociology and sexuality studies (see, for example, McCaffrey, forthcoming), performance studies, (lesbian and gay) anthropology, language and sexuality studies, and other fields that are responding to the anti-social thesis in (Anglo-American) queer theory, which grew out of the work of, among others, Leo Bersani’s Homos (1995), and most forcefully in Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and The Death Drive (2004). As Edelman would have it, queers are subjugated to the heteronormative matrix of success and reproduction that ends with a future with children, which he refers to a ‘reproductive futurism’. Edelman argues in support of an anti-social thesis where queers escape the telos of this capitalist machine through their non-relational sex (understood here as anal sex – see Bersani, 1995) and jouissance that undoes identity and the heteronormative order through its rejection of reproductive sex and its celebration of the death drive. ⁴ In sum, Eribon asks us to rethink Edelman’s version of queer theory by finding new paths back to a queer future that involves the social and the human in all its complexity, encompassing not only sexuality but all marginal positions and multiple temporalities.

Queer theory’s impact and contribution is significantly enlarged by queer anthropology and queer linguistics, in particular. In fact, lesbian and gay anthropologists are now engaged in fieldwork that we categorise more as ‘queer’ than ‘gay- and lesbian-identified’. The name change in 2010 of SOLGA (Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists) to AQA (American Queer Anthropologists) in the AAA (American Anthropological Association) is one indication of this. In Out in Public (2009), editors Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap also discuss a turn in lesbian and gay anthropology that engages with queer theory. Leap and Lewin write: ‘concerns with a politics of difference, rather than descriptions of sexual differences, suggests an alignment with the interests of queer theory’ (2009: 6). At the same time, however, they emphasise ‘queer theory’s problematic relationship to the particulars of lived experience’ and they call for more ‘data-centered inquiry’ (2009: 6) to correct for this. Moreover, scholarship over the last 20 years in the Anglophone context, with annual conferences like ‘Lavender Languages and Linguistics’ at the American University in Washington, DC, exemplify a continued interest in bringing together queer theory and language studies. This is also evident with the 2012 launch of the Journal of Language and Sexuality. Drawing on work in queer theory and Halberstam’s notion of queer temporalities (2005) in particular, the journal’s editors William Leap and Heiko Motschenbacher argue that since all kinds of people ‘live outside reproductive and familial time, as well as on the edges of logics of labor and production’, then ‘linguistic practices associated with [these] temporal locations are also associated with queerness’ (2012: 7). Hence, the journal reflects a growing trend in the field to study a broad range of language practices in a variety of communities of practice.

My point here is to suggest that questions raised in queer anthropology and queer linguistics might productively apply to those of us working on all kinds of ‘normativity’ in French cultural studies. I would like us to think a bit about what a queer ethnography in French cultural studies would entail. Could it answer questions better than those raised by queer theory alone and could it even help us to formulate better questions? Finally, could this enhance the work now being widely done in French and Francophone studies? I am thinking specifically here about all that is currently housed under the umbrella of postcolonial Francophone studies – who these subaltern subjects are, how they speak, and what types of power and norms they critique. While scholarship in queer studies and Francophone studies (Hawley, 2001; Hayes, 2000) over the last decade has begun to investigate what we can learn from the ‘postcolonial queer’, little or no work with empirical data has been done to date in French and Francophone cultural studies. Boittin and Stovall’s 2010 special issue of French Historical Studies is an excellent example of a growing body of work that interrogates the intersections of race and gender in a particularly historiographical context. This current essay aims to build on such scholarship by interrogating the invisible social category of homosexuality, which remains highly overlooked because of its taboo nature within postcolonial communities in France and its former empires, and because of the hierarchies of oppression within the academy and its related disciplines within the social sciences and humanities.

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 ourselves with a broader understanding of their lived experiences. Quoting Eng et al. (2005), William Leap reminds us that ‘the political promise of [queer] reside[s] specifically in its broad critique of multiple social antagonisms, including race, gender, class, nationality and religion, in addition to sexuality’ (2012: 562). Hence a queer linguistic approach will attempt to account for these multiple identities and the interaction between them.

In the excerpts that follow, I present 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. ⁵ As we shall see, Tahar’s story involves being ‘beur’, ‘being homosexual’ and ‘being fat’. This Maghrebi-French citizen 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.

Tahar’s queerness and queer pedagogy

‘Tahar’ was born in Tunis in the 1960s, and he and his Tunisian parents moved to France when he was almost a year old. They settled in the city of Dreux in northern France where his younger sister and two brothers were born. During our conversation, Tahar highlights first the Maghrebi tradition by speaking about the importance of the family (‘les liens familiaux sont forts’) and the role of the eldest male child (‘tous les espoirs reposent sur toi’). Also, much of his interview highlights the need to succeed as a child of Maghrebi parents: ‘Comme le garçon aîné, il faut réussir.’ He had to be the leader and the example for his siblings. He states:

tu deviens le leader et il faut montrer le chemin, il faut être exemplaire. Il n’y a pas de place en fait pour tout ce qui est homosexualité, sexualité, tout ça. C’était la réussite avant tout, montrer l’exemple, être quelque de bien, et puis, bon, être quelque part honorable.

Like many of the queer Maghrebi French speakers I have interviewed, he underscores the invisibility of homosexuality within the Maghrebi family and the need to be honourable and successful. At the same time, however, he will accept these social obligations and then use them as a way to ‘disidentify’ or to ‘steal the stereotype’: both of these terms mean to inhabit and to displace, and thus to defamiliarise the stereotype through repletion, quotations, distortions and linguistic changes. I rely here on José Estaban Muñoz’s notion of ‘disidentification’ (1998), derived from Michel Pêcheux’s work, and on 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 try ‘to transform cultural logic from within’ a dominant system of identification and assimilation (Muñoz, 1999: 11–12). In his study of the politics of queer performance artists of colour, Muñoz writes:

Disidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to phantasm of normative citizenship. (Muñoz, 1999: 4)

He continues: ‘It often involves subjects whose identities are formed in response to cultural logics of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and misogyny – cultural logics that I will suggest work to undergird state power’ (1999: 5). Finally, he clarifies the fact that:

disidentification is not always an adequate strategy of resistance or survival for all minority subjects. At times, resistance needs to be pronounced and direct; on other occasions, queers of color and other minority subjects need to follow a conformist path if they hope to survive a hostile public. But for some, disidentification is a survival strategy that works within and outside the dominant public sphere simultaneously. (1999: 5)

Mireille Rosello’s scholarship on ‘declining the stereotype’ (1998), functions very much like what Muñoz calls ‘disidentification’. Rosello states that declining is a process that: ‘includes a “necessary mimetic energy” that still draws on the original stereotype’ (1998: 11). It is also a ‘way of depriving [the stereotype] of its harmful potential’ (1998: 11) and ‘an ambiguous gesture of refusal and participation at the same time … where both the stereotype and its critique cohabit so intimately that no safe barrier can be erected between the two’ (1998: 13).

Returning to Tahar, we see that he accepts the role of the exemplary leader: ‘Il y en a qui la refusent et d’autres qui l’acceptent. Dans mon cas en fait, je l’ai acceptée parce que je savais que c’était une arme. Enfin, je pouvais l’utiliser pour faire passer qui j’étais’. Tahar knows that this performance as the good Maghrebi son will allow him to prepare his own path to liberation. He admits that he would like to free himself from this familial system when he states: ‘En fait être un exemple de liberté surtout, liberté physique, liberté intellectuelle, liberté morale, et puis, en fait, et on m’a appris à être libre, à être indépendant d’abord, et être libre après’. ⁶ In this sense, Tahar’s story illustrates the ‘emancipation’ and ‘liberté’ model of queer theory that Eribon critiques. However this is not where his story ends.

While Tahar highlights the need to be recognised within the Maghrebi family as good and honourable – and he is reproducing the story of ‘le fîls aîné du fîls ainé’ that many of my interlocutors speak about – he will then use this ‘insider position’ as a point of departure to disidentify from the norm or to ‘decline’ several stereotypes. We could certainly read this as an eventual coming-out narrative; however, there is much more going on, in that he moves back and forth between several spaces and temporalities at the same time. For example, he talks about how getting out of the ghetto was much harder for him than leaving the closet: ‘Sortir de la cité, et d’en faire plus, réussir, c’était plus difficile que sortir du placard.’ Moreover, he later talks about the triple marginalisation that he battled throughout his childhood and along his path toward freedom – being gay, being ‘beur’ (second generation in France being raised by immigrant parents of North African descent) and being fat – and indeed, a queer linguistic approach that accounts for multiple identity categories helps us here. For Leap, a queer linguistic approach involves ‘uneven inflections between discursive practice and structures of power, with sexuality so often used as the signpost to indicate the critical points of intersection’ (2012: 562). ⁷ We see this at work in Tahar’s speech acts. He states:

001 … je parle toujours de gbg … c’était mes trois tares, gros, beur, et gay,

002 alors, gbg. ‘Alors, le pauvre,’ pour moi, c’est le bicot de service, en

003 français, c’est l’arabe de service, quoi. ‘En plus, il est gay, en plus, il est

004 gros’. Donc, du coup, c’est le comble, quoi, à chaque fois, tu as un truc qui 005 aggrave l’autre, quoi. Pour moi, c’était une triple marginalité, tu

006 imagines? Il fallait en faire beaucoup plus que les autres, il fallait

007 toujours être dans l’excès, au niveau des études, de l’instruction, il fallait

008 être dans l’excès, on ne se contente pas de la place du troisième, il fallait

009 être le meilleur, même si tu n’as pas l’esprit, il fallait l’avoir, il fallait

010 utiliser les stratégies…il fallait démolir les autres mais gentiment. Quand

011 je dis démolir les autres … c’était être ambitieux, très ambitieux. En tout

012 cas pour moi, il fallait être très ambitieux. C’était la façon de combattre

013 la discrimination, toute discrimination …

First, Tahar draws on the well-known French term bcbg – bon chic bon genre – which indexes a heteronormative, middle-class position of good taste and fashion. With his invention of the term gbg, he successfully disidentifies with this position by reinventing it to fit his own situation. In this excerpt, Tahar goes on to explain his triple marginalisation and the multiple temporalities where he must learn to survive – how it is difficult to be gay in the projects, difficult to be fat in the Marais or ‘gay’ France, and difficult to be ‘beur’ in France at large. My point here is that Tahar’s is not a coming-out story where ‘il assume son homosexualité’ as I have documented elsewhere (Provencher, 2007), but one of disidentification – confronting and contesting the normativity demanded with regard to sexuality, ethnicity and body type. He states: ‘Tu n’assumes pas vraiment, en fait tu fuis la responsabilité, l’identité en fait, tu deviens très pragmatique, tu deviens contestataire, tu rejettes pas mal de choses en fait qui sont sensées te construire’. Hence, rejecting and subverting norms becomes his modus operandi. ⁸

Tahar speaks in the above excerpt about how he always had to take a position of excess – through intellect and through humour and outrageous behaviour – in order to draw attention away from his sexuality as well as his fat Arab body. His excessive behaviour, which included his excessive corpulence, allowed him to maintain a position of difference (a symbol of pride) that differentiated him from his biological family. At the same time, this excessiveness masked other differences and protected him in other contexts. For example, the other kids in the ‘cité’ would pick on him for being fat or smart, but not for being gay. The gay men in the Marais would not exoticise or eroticise his Arab body, and hence he did not become a ‘morceau de viande’ like other Arab gay men that I have documented elsewhere (Provencher, 2007).

Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009) provides a striking analysis of queer children across a range of texts and shows how the queer ghost child emerges in some of these. In her reading of the Canadian film The Hanging Garden (1996), she shows how the metaphor of fat plays an essential role in the queering of the child’s body and is indicative of a ‘growing sideways’ instead of ‘growing up’, and of a primary ghost that stands in for another ghost. She writes:

Fat, we find, is a thick figuration and referent for a child (a sexual child) we cannot fully see. Fat is the visible effect, in this instance, of a child unable to grow ‘up’ in his family as his preferred self. So he grows sideways – literally, metaphorically. He is occulted into something to be seen: a visible difference from the [film’s] other boys … that bespeaks a dead or dying growing up to the stature of straightness. (Stockton, 2009: 20–1)

During his childhood and adolescence, Tahar’s visible difference, coupled with his sharp tongue and intellect, become his weapons of defence in ‘la cité’, in le Marais and in the French cultural landscape at large.

In the end, Tahar loses weight and ‘comes out’ of his fat body and the other marginalities, but he never foregrounds one identity position – sexuality, ethnicity or corporeality – more than the others in his speech. He states: ‘Je suis sorti du corps qui était trop gros, je suis sorti de moi-même dans tous les sens. Ce qui me reste c’est ma liberté, de penser, d’agir, j’ai le choix de le faire.’ He will also later come out as gay to his parents, but he believes even today that his parents do not completely understand who he is (i.e. his personality and his general ‘attitude contestataire’).

Tahar’s new ‘dissident’, or what I am calling ‘queer’ model as a freethinker and a revolutionary will also play out in his role as a teacher in a French public school. He expresses his desire to ‘faire changer les choses’ and ‘changer le système de l’intérieur du système’. He talks about how his role as a ‘foreigner’ within a French system can be useful here. He considers himself an ‘étranger’ in the sense that he is a second-generation Maghrebi-French man who has studied at the Sorbonne. He explains how he applies this subversive or ‘queer’ model as a Spanish teacher in a bourgeois French school. He states:

001 …je me suis rendu compte que l’impact que tu pouvais avoir en tant qu’

002 ‘étranger’ pouvait être beaucoup plus important en enseignant en fait

003 aux gens issus d’un milieu socioprofessionnel élevé. Si tu enseignes dans

004 une banlieue, d’accord, les choses vont changer … mais si tu enseignes en

005 fait dans le seizième, dans le sixième, dans le cinquième … Par exemple,

006 quand j’étais à Saint Germain-en-Laye, il y avait des parents dont les

007 enfants ont complètement changé de façon de penser et voir les

008 choses … dans mon cas, c’est par rapport à l’image tout de suite, quand on

009 parle d’un étranger en France, c’est tout de suite le rap et le hip-hop,

010 c’est tout de suite en fait une façon de parler assez vulgaire, le verlan,

011 l’argot et tout ça. Moi, en cours, non … je ne le faisais pas pour justement

012 pour ne pas aller dans le sens de l’idée reçue et de la pensée dominante à

013 propos des gens qui sont issus justement de l’immigration maghrébine.

014 Et justement … par rapport à mon enseignement … je n’aime pas du tout

015 les clichés, donc quand tu vois les documents que j’ai choisis, tous les

016 documents portent sur un cliché, c’est quoi l’Espagne, c’est la fiesta, la

017 sieste, les tapas, la plage et soleil, mais c’est pas que ça, ils ont connu une

018 dictature, et ensuite tu leur dis que dans certains pays en Afrique du

019 Nord, il y en a encore, et tu fais toujours le rapprochement par rapport à

020 l’élève et ses origines et tu le fais réfléchir, et même si après ils disent,

021 ‘oui, mais on vit en France, on vit en démocratie’ et tu leur dis ‘oui, mais

022 la démocratie est un peu estropiée, des fois, on a l’impression d’être dans

023 les dictatures qui sont déguisées’ et tu leur expliques pourquoi, donc tu

024 les fais réfléchir, le pouvoir, l’argent et tout ça, mais sans critiquer leurs

025 points de vue, sans les juger, tu leur proposes, et après en fait c’est à eux

026 de voir s’ils prennent ou pas, mais en général ils prennent, en général ils

027 ne rejettent pas pourquoi parce que si tu construis bien ton

028 raisonnement, et si tu choisis bien tes documents … à un moment où un

029 autre, ils basculent.

In this final excerpt, Tahar speaks about adopting an outsider position as an ‘étranger’; this becomes the subversive or ‘queer’ model he uses to open the minds of his students, and ‘démolir’ their preconceived notions about other cultures. Halberstam refers to this as ‘pedagogical project of creating monsters’ (2011: 20). For Tahar, this model works from within the French educational system, with carefully chosen teaching materials, taking a critical stance towards these documents, and gently critiquing his students’ assumed viewpoints (and indirectly those of their middle-class parents). His use of the expression ‘il fallait’ during our interview is an indication of a former sense of self and feeling of obligation (i.e. a temporality that he has been able to leave behind). In fact, Tahar imagines a France of the future where the next generation of citizens question multiple norms associated with ethnicity, sexuality, money, power, government and more. In his opinion, there is a need for more ‘mixité sociale’ in French society and he is adopting a critical, queer approach to teach his French students about this. Tahar as a foreigner declines the stereotype of the (Spanish) foreigner, manipulating it to reveal the various grids of power functioning in a society. This process also involves a ‘basculement’ (line 029) – a ‘shift’ or ‘tipping’ ⁹ – in mentality for his students that then reshapes not only what they know, but also how they ask questions and how they approach the world (a new ‘habitus’). Eribon writes:

Au recours mystificateur à la notion d’une ‘structure œdipienne’ qui serait intrafamiliale, il convient donc de substituer une analyse en termes de rapports différentiels, d’une génération à l’autre, au système scolaire: l’analyse doit remplacer l’Œdipe par l’École et par la Culture. (2013: 90)

In contrast to the private familial space of filial relations and the Oedipus complex, when students enter the school and the classroom they potentially enter queer time and space by encountering the ‘other’, including the ‘other’ in themselves. Tahar helps his students to enter this queer temporal space where they meet other forms of difference in themselves and others and where they acquire the skills to imagine a new way of being and belonging in a twenty-first-century France. They also become his queer children in the process.

Conclusion

In sum, Tahar’s story helps us to see how multiple minority positions and temporalities – with regard to sexuality, ethnicity and obesity (physical fitness) – function within a life story. Tahar 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. And a queer linguistic approach with ethnographic interviews is most useful here as it addresses the material conditions and agency from within the system. At the same time, Tahar’s story does not offer a utopian or myopic view of what a queer life in France would entail, and it provides a more nuanced and complex image of queer life than theory alone could provide and hence serves as a powerful counter-example to the type of work Eribon critiques.

Finally, Tahar’s subversiveness or ‘queerness’ does not come from an outright rejection of the dominant ideologies, but from an ability to disidentify within the system from several normative/queer binaries – French/foreigner, heternormative/queer, thin/fat. Indeed, he moves increasingly towards liberation and personal freedom, but this manoeuvre operates from within the system and in relation to other subject positions, and it involves a future with children. While Tahar mentions the Maghrebi family and the importance of the eldest male child, the family does not become the ‘master narrative’ in his storytelling. As Leap states: ‘queer discursive practices unfold unevenly for speakers depending’ on ‘the particulars of race and ethnic background, class position, age, dimensions of (dis)ability, and attendant locations of citizenship, nationality, and diasporic flow shape discussions about gender in the social moment’ (2012: 558). Tahar experiences exclusion in France because of his various ‘outsider’ statuses. He is an example of a queer/dissident citizen who expresses resilience by successfully stealing and reversing multiple stereotypes and transmitting a new mode of thinking to his own queer children in the future. This uneven inflection of multiple identities and temporalities ultimately questions the normalising tendencies in queer theory that, according to Eribon, overlooks such complexity and views all counter-positions as ‘confrontation’.

In conclusion, queer ethnography and queer linguistics allow us to formulate questions that surpass questions of identity and theories of sexuality. In fact, they work to reveal different positions (ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, class, age, etc.) and their interactions in lived experiences and they account for the imbrication of multiple differences that neither postcolonial nor social constructivist approaches can do alone. This model could also provide a more powerful analytic lens for understanding the multiple issues – gender, class, language, sexuality – of postcolonial Francophone subjects in France. And, finally, it allows those of us in cultural studies to do queer work of subversion and constructive work of reconstruction at the same time.