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Sex, Race, and the Epistemology of Desire in the Literature and Culture of Contemporary France Blase A. Provitola Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 © 2019 Blase A. Provitola All rights reserved ABSTRACT Sex, Race, and the Epistemology of Desire in the Literature and Culture of Contemporary France Blase A. Provitola This dissertation examines the literary and activist histories of lesbian and queer communities in France from 1968 to the present, retracing the changing relationship between national and sexual identities. It contributes in several ways to debates about ‘homonormativity’ and ‘sexual democracy’ that have unfolded in France since the beginning of the twenty-first century, notably by bringing recent historical and sociological scholarship on the racialization of gender and sexuality into dialogue with literary studies. Sex, Race and the Epistemology of Desire puts well-established literary authors (such as Monique Wittig, Mireille Best, and Nina Bouraoui) in conversation with little-known queer writers and activists of color (such as the Groupe du 6 novembre and the Lesbiennes of color), studying processes of subject formation through which individuals come to understand their desires in relation to family structures and community belonging. Through historically and politically contextualized readings, it reflects on the fact that desire has often come to be understood through the lens of sexual identity, arguing that assumptions about the importance of visibility and “coming out” have tended to marginalize poor and racialized groups. Deconstructing the common opposition between “identitarian” and “non-identitarian” literature, it argues for a richer and more epistemologically-attentive approach to sexual and gender politics. It shows that this epistemological reframing is necessary to counteract mainstream media’s often reductive accounts of minority sexualities, particularly with respect to Islamic, Middle Eastern, or North African cultures. i TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Reading Desire in the Republic, or, Do Zouzou and France sleep in the same bed? ………...……………1 Chapter One In Visibilities: The Groupe du 6 novembre and the Racialization of Sexual Orientation…...……………41 Chapter Two Saint Wittig: Queer Modernity and Progress Narratives of Resistance………………………...………..101 Chapter Three Desiring Communities?: Identity Ambivalence in the Works of Nina Bouraoui and Mireille Best....….175 Chapter Four Queer is Not Enough: Decolonizing Epistemologies of Desire………………………………….………241 Conclusion Re-presence and the Redefinition of the Archive……………………………………………...………...295 Bibliography……………………………………………………...………………………………………299 iii To my chosen family whose love and support made the completion of this project possible, and especially to Colleen, Elliot, Emily, Kae, Syd, and Val 1 INTRODUCTION Reading Desire in the Republic, or, Do Zouzou and France sleep in the same bed? Le féminisme blanc est soutenu par l’hégémonie d’un récit dont la temporalité et la spatialité sont dessinées par une modernité européenne qui a introduit une dichotomie entre ce qui est humain et ce qui ne l’est pas.1 – Françoise Vergès, 2019 In Leïla Sebbar’s novel Shérazade: 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts (1982), the eponymous heroine meets two charming young women, Zouzou and France, who work with her at a boutique in the central area of Les Halles in Paris. Originally from Tunisia and Martinique, respectively, Zouzou and France spend most of their weekend nights at boozy parties, where they get ogled by fashion industry hipsters eager to capitalize off of the latest street trends worn by their young guests, who are mostly from the “béton des blocs de banlieue [concrete jungle of urban housing projects].”2 Zouzou and France know that getting noticed could be their ticket out of poverty, so they play with the exotic archetypes that they know this crowd wants to see, well- aware that they “[plaisent] autant aux hommes qu’aux femmes [are appealing to men as well as women].”3 It is not only their “look pas possible [unbelievable style]” that attracts them attention, but also their unusually close bond: they are together “vingt-quatre heures sur vingt- quatre [twenty-four seven]” and share a small studio apartment.4 This ambiguous arrangement provokes much murmuring and speculation. When one of their male friends asks them if they sleep in the same bed, they do not respond. 1 “White feminism is upheld by the hegemony of a narrative whose temporality and spatiality are drawn by a European modernity that has created a dichotomy between what is human and what is not.” Françoise Vergès, “Toutes les féministes ne sont pas blanches,” H-France 11, no. 2 (2019): 1–5. 2 Leïla Sebbar, Shérazade: 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts [Shérazade: 17 years old, dark curly hair, green eyes] (Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule: Bleu autour, 2010 [1982]), 110. All translations in this dissertation are mine unless otherwise noted. 3 Sebbar, Shérazade, 115. 4 Sebbar, Shérazade, 144. 2 The opacity of their relationship only increases the curiosity of party-goers and industry professionals, who see this mysterious pair of exotic beauties as a goldmine. When a famous photographer offers to pay Zouzou, France, and Shérazade handsomely for a titillating afternoon photoshoot, they accept—but only in order to put a stop to the exploitative practices for which he is known. After arriving at his studio, they are not surprised when he asks them to kiss and fondle each other in skimpy animal-print garb, and to pose as “guérillères [female guerilla fighters]” holding unloaded machine guns.5 “Les scènes de jungle [jungle scenes],” he explains to them, are very “in” at the moment, and will appeal to his “clients [male clients]”—as well as his “clientes [female clients],” he adds, “pour prouver à quel point le public était large [to show what a wide audience he had].”6 The photographer soon discovers, however, that these girls have no intention of following his instructions when they pull out their own (realistic imitation) pistols on him before running off with their pay. Clearly, he had not been counting on these young women to turn his spectacle of exotic sexuality into a scene worthy of the guerrillères in Monique Wittig’s 1969 feminist classic. Zouzou and France, who occupy no more than a dozen of that novel’s 250 pages, are in some ways at the genesis of this dissertation. In a Francophone context, I initially thought that questions of desire between women were as absent from postcolonial literature as were questions of race and colonization from lesbian literature. Scholarship in these fields certainly seemed to confirm that in any event. The works of Franco-Algerian novelist Nina Bouraoui beginning in 2005 seemed to be the exception that proved the rule, and, as will be discussed later in this dissertation, her road to being readable as a lesbian author was a long and tortuous one. This relative silence stood in stark contrast to other discourses on race and sex, which became 5 Sebbar, Shérazade, 147. 6 Sebbar, Shérazade, 147, 145. 3 omnipresent as unprecedented media attention tied questions of sexual modernity to issues of immigration, citizenship, and national belonging. Anxieties built up around recurring racialized figures in the media—in particular the victimized fille voilée (“veiled woman”) and virile garçon arabe (“Arab man”)—demonstrated how central certain norms of sex, gender, and sexuality were becoming to national identity.7 The hypervisibility of those scapegoats stood in contrast to the relative absence of other less easily-digestable and less stereotypical subjects and narratives. Beyond these problematic media stereotypes that reinforced the same tired narratives over and over, there were clearly much more nuanced stories to be told about the ways in which various social groups inhabited the many different and interrelated aspects of their identities. Such stories might be less legible perhaps in part because, like Zouzou and France, they did not make themselves legible according to French standards of intimacy and bodily presentation. By looking at the figures most marginalized in contemporary debates on immigration, I sought to better understand the forces that made them a discursive impossibility. I thus set out to learn how desire and sexuality have come to be known and studied, with the hope of elucidating and counteracting the discourses underlying problematic narratives of French (and, more broadly, Western) sexual civilization and modernity. I first turned to sources challenging dominant socio-sexual norms—gay, lesbian, and feminist history and literature— only to discover that critical analyses of race, immigration, and class seemed nearly as absent from such sources as they were from the mainstream media. Yet if such questions had not been broached in those publications, it seemed impossible to me that they had never been posed. Foregrounding such questions would require interrogating the assumptions at work in existing research, which I suspected were still unwittingly privileging certain socio-sexual norms even in 7 If I include the original French phrases in italics, it is to indicate their establishment and circulation as currency in the media. Nacira Guénif Souilamas and Éric Macé, Les féministes et le garçon arabe (La Tour d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, 2004). 4 studies of sexual minorities. How could I study race, gender, and

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