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Queering
the Other: Gender trouble and post-colonial French cinema
Brigitte
Rollet
French
Department
(ULIP
)University of London Institute in Paris)
The tradition of universalism inherited from the
French Revolution which denies the existence of
differences based either on sex, social or ethnic
background, religion, age, or sexual orientation (‘all
citizens are equal’ without these considerations), is
one of the main reasons for the reluctance in recognising
variety within French society and culture. Unlike in
Britain and the USA, minorities are –almost
constitutionally- problematic within a French context and
French mainstream/commercial cinema have introduced or
acknowledged very few characters with other sexual
orientations than the dominant and compulsory
heterosexuality. Similarly, questions of ethnicity are not
often considered and represented the way they can be in
other national cinemas.
This does not mean however, that minorities are absent
in French films. However gays, lesbians and ethnic others
are regularly portrayed as caricatures or stereotypes both
in popular and non commercial (auteur) cinema, and
indirectly comfort the norms of the majority in terms of
sexuality and ethnicity. In both end of the French filmic
spectrum, homosexuality as a whole is always constructed
in opposition to the dominant norms regarding sexual
identity and orientation. Gays and lesbians are therefore
the “others” of the male and female straight
characters (and audience alike) and everything in the
films is made to show and to maintain the boundaries
between the norm and the margins. Gay (and some ethnic
minorities) directors themselves do not escape this
tendency and often internalise dominant constructions,
reproducing binary opposition man/woman, heterosexuality/homosexuality
or white/non-white. Similarly, the figure of the
transvestite is regularly constructed as a ridiculous
character, someone to le laughed at and mocked, a human
being which far from offering a “third way”
contributes to reinforce dominant assumptions regarding
sexual identity and orientation.
In such a context, my use of the word “queer”
might sound rather surprising, not to say inappropriate. I
will employ it nonetheless in my analysis of a handful of
films and characters which seem to transcend the
boundaries between gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Made
by French directors of North-African descent, these
pictures are therefore considered as “beur” films
(i.e. films made from the mid-1980s by second-generation
immigrants from North African former French colonies).
However, unlike most “beur” films which repeatedly
offer chauvinistic straight young males who explicitly
defend traditional conceptions of virility, these films
challenge dominant representations of masculinity,
heterosexuality and ethnicity by creating characters in
drag, who transcend the usual boundaries of sex, gender
and sexuality. Therefore, they often reject the issue of
binary oppositions mentioned above and create characters
and situation sometimes verging on queer, in the way they
resist norms and classifications. Hence, Mehdi Charef in Miss
Mona (1986), Karim Dridi in Pigalle (1994) and
Merzak Allouache in Chouchou (2002), escape the
sexual and textual rules of “beur” –and French-
films by questioning sexual as well as national and ethnic
identities. This paper will address their attempt to
create new identities by trying to blur categories and to
offer another variety of “queer” characters.
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