Introduction: Enter the Sexagon

Among the sensitive questions involving Muslims living in the West, and in Europe most singularly, there is the position of Islam on homosexuality. In certain contexts, this question would be the sole and unique key to the possible “integration” of Muslims in Western culture. As if European cultures and values could be reduced to the acceptance or rejection of homosexuality....

The Banlieue Has a Gender: Competing Visions of Sexual Diversity

This chapter examines the various ways journalists and activists who purport to fight for sexual diversity have actually reified sexual conformism through two processes: the demonization of the banlieue’s racialized, non-normative sexualities and the willful denial of the banlieue’s queer potential. In journalism, investigative reports, and interventions on the ground, commentators purporting to represent gay and feminist interests have focused on an uncommonly sexist banlieusard virility, with alleged roots in Islamic cultures. This process fits into a larger, more familiar one, in which immigration from the former colonies has been sexualized, with concerns articulated around men’s machismo and women’s subjugation. In recent years, respect for sexual minorities has constituted a new frontier for campaigns targeting banlieue attitudes and behaviors. In this vein, some campaigns purporting to “defend” have taken the form of attacks. Rhetoric about “saving” banlieue women and homosexuals has exoticized the banlieues as inhospitable and lawless zones worthy of human rights intervention. At the same time that it defines the homosexual victim, this rhetoric also determines the “appropriate” expression of homosexual identity or practices.

Conclusion: The Sexagon’s Border Crisis

Though far from comprehensive, Sexagon offers five interconnected perspectives into the sexualization of immigration. Recurring tropes and persistent figures cross boundaries of art and discipline, establishing a continuum of representations that filter cultural and ethnic difference through the prism of sexuality. This Western strategy, of comprehending the other’s cultural difference by expressing it in the more “intelligible” language of sexuality, has precedents in the Orientalist output of old. There are contemporary and political factors involved, however, when this translation of cultural difference into sexual difference happens in postcolonial, postimmigration Europe. The terms sexual modernity, sexual democracy, and sexual citizenship were coined to qualify our new sexualized hierarchies of cultural capital. A battle of representations has broken out on the slippery terrain where culture meets politics in multiethnic France: it has been fomented by the recasting of the issue of cultural assimilation as a sexual one, as well as by the initially slow but now increasing consciousness that such a recasting has taken place.

Erotic Solutions for Ethnic Tension: Fantasy, Reality, Pornography

This chapter examine how the French porn industry channels and manipulates tensions and fears related to the immigration debate and the place of Arabs in France, at times offering erotic “remedies.” This has culminated in a new pornotrope: Porno Ethnik, or pornography involving men and women of color, usually Arab or black. The chapter begins with a discussion of the output of French directors who were the first to feature Franco-Arab actors in gay male pornography: Jean-Daniel Cadinot (Cadinot), Jean-Noël René Clair (JNRC), and Stéphane Chibikh (Citébeur). It then considers heterosexual pornography featuring Franco-Arab women and asks whether or not this field of production is so different in its representations of minority sexuality that it precludes comparison with homosexual pornography. Tropes of sex tourism to North Africa, the hypersexualization of single immigrant men, the “eroticization of poverty” as regards both women and men, the veil as striptease, and the “homothug” type are all surveyed. Pornography, often seen as apolitical, does tackle issues of undigested colonial memory and contemporary race relations in a much more forthright (if politically incorrect) way than do the traditional journalistic means available.

Sexual Undergrounds: Cinema, Performance, and Ethnic Surveillance

Against the backdrop of an overwhelming vilification of Arab, immigrant, and banlieusard masculinities on screen, I show how a selection of innovative films have sought to rehabilitate that masculinity and show its unexpected importance, even its necessity in French society. Far from being possessive, ethnocentric sexists jealously guarding their community borders, Arab men are shown to stand at the center of social constellations that include sexual minorities and a high degree of sexual experimentation. Recurrent throughout this chapter are the commonalities between the French policing of both ethnic and sexual “outlaws,” which can take symbolic or literal form or come from unexpected perspectives. In this way, the policed sexualities of minority characters become socially delinquent, shifting in and out of a “French-ness” confused with orderly, bourgeois sexuality. In connection with previous arguments about the rehabilitation of ethnic virilities and homosocialities on screen, this chapter shows how the concept of the urban sexual underground (populated by a variety of sexual minorities including sex worker and trans) has crucially hosted Arab masculinities and offered them spaces to nurture and bear witness to their own social utility.

Uncultured Yet Seductive: The Trope of the Difficult Arab Boy

This chapter surveys representations of the Arab male in contemporary French and Francophone literature. It argues that Arab men, especially those who show signs of ethnic affirmation, are often cast outside privileged circles of “gay” space just as they are eroticized. This can happen in narratives about sex tourism, about the mixing of classes and ethnicities in metropolitan France, or in those that concern the French cultural elite, wherein Arab men are posited as threats and nuisances to gay cultural, esthetic, and philosophical sensibilities. This is especially the case at moments of literary collaboration between Arab and white authors, or when Arab partners try to assert themselves in a literary or intellectual sense. There is of course a backlash against this intellectual belittling, both from a subsequent generation of white gay writers as well as from emergent Franco-Arab voices. This chapter pays special attention to how post-colonial resentment about past inter-ethnic belittling is portrayed via the historical motif of the “Arab boy,” transplanted from an exploited status in colonial settings to an un-assimilated status in contemporary France.

Constructing the Broken Family: The Draw for Psychoanalysis

From the early days of colonial ethno-psychiatry and the Algiers school to the current era of media interventions by French psychoanalysts, commentators with backgrounds in psychoanalysis have often been called upon to lend their expertise to the discussion of cultural and ethnic difference. This chapter looks at how these sciences, with their particular attentiveness to sexuality, have approached issues of immigration, Islam, and the place of minorities in French domestic affairs. At the core of this chapter is the argument that psychoanalytical commentators have conceptualized these issues through the lens of a (broken) family unit that updates, in dystopian fashion, the Freudian family unit of bourgeois Vienna for contemporary circumstances. United in their “pathologized” status, the “juvenile delinquent,” the “veiled woman,” and the “impotent father” are figures that together make up a symbolic family unit, drawn up by psychoanalysts who write about urban France, immigration, and/or North Africa. Reading about this dysfunctional family, one quickly gets the sense that Muslims’ continuing influx into Europe will have “dire” psycho-sexual consequences on the continent, due to their psychoanalytically aberrant views on the public-private distinction and patriarchal law.