Immigration and Sexual Citizenship: Gender, Sexuality and Ethnicity in Contemporary France Mehammed Amadeus Mack Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 © 2012 Mehammed Amadeus Mack All rights reserved ABSTRACT Dissertation Title: “Immigration and Sexual Citizenship: Gender, Sexuality and Ethnicity in Contemporary France” Mehammed Amadeus Mack This dissertation considers discourses bearing on the social dynamics of immigration and postcolonial diversity in contemporary France in light of their interconnections with issues of sexuality and assimilation. Synthesizing and building on recent work by anthropologists, sociologists and cultural theorists it explores the current debate over French identity--a debate that has to a considerable extent revolved around the impact of recent postwar immigration to France and the "integration" of immigrants on the cultural level, and of which a recent symptom has been the Sarkozy government's launch of a public national debate about "l'identité nationale" (national identity). Overall, my project focuses on the intermingling of the cultural and the political in cultural representations of immigrants and their descendants. Specifically, I consider the highly charged terrain of the representation of sexuality. In the discourse on laïcité (secularism) and integration, gender norms and tolerance of homosexuality have emerged as key components and are now often employed to highlight immigrants' "un-French" attitudes. I argue that, as French and immigrant identities have been called into question, sexuality has constituted a favored prism through which to establish the existence of difference. Through the study of cultural representations of immigration, I will explain how the potential of immigrants and their descendants to assimilate is often judged according to the "fitness" of their attitudes about sexuality. I will further argue that the successful assimilation of immigrants often follows a "required" phase of sexualization, in which the sexuality of the immigrant becomes his or her main marker, the primary factor through which the immigrant is intelligible, beyond other possibly relevant criteria. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Introduction: “Sexagon”………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One: Activists and Competing Visions of Sexual Diversity…………………………………35 Chapter Two: Pathologizing Sexuality: Psychoanalysts and Ethnopsychiatrists Comment on the Immigration Debate…………………………………………………………………………………..129 Chapter Three: Collaborations and Inter-ethnic Relationships in Literature…………………………198 Chapter Four: Cinema and the Surveillance of Minorities……………………………………...……261 Epilogue and Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….318 Bibliography……………………………………………………...…………………………………..366 i For my immigrant parents, Mark and Faiza ii 1 INTRODUCTION: “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 1 values could be reduced to the acceptance or rejection of homosexuality. —Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies, University of Oxford. In May 2009, the theologian Tariq Ramadan addressed what he felt to be a polemic 2 taking shape in the Western European media. Attitudes about sexuality, he argued, were increasingly being politicized and tied to the question of Muslim integration in Europe. Himself a proponent of a “French” and more largely a “European Islam,” Ramadan has been a prominent chronicler of the formation of European Muslim identity. He has stressed its roots in post-immigration European society and posited that it exists independently of influences from immigrants’ countries of origin. A telegenic polyglot, Ramadan enjoys a demographically significant following among Muslim youth in Europe and beyond. Advocating for women’s right to wear the Islamic veil, he has been subject to criticism by journalists and politicians invoking the need to protect laïcité or France’s form of secularism. These exchanges culminated in a televised debate with then presidential-candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, in which the politician aggressively presented himself as a defender of women’s freedoms against Ramadan, whom he alleged to be misogynistic in reality and a proponent of women’s rights only publicly. 4 Le Monde columnist and former President of Paris’ Gay and Lesbian Center Caroline Fourest devoted a book-length study5 to unpacking what she called 1 Ramadan, Tariq. “Islam et homosexualité”. www.tariqramadan.com. 28 May 2009. http://www.tariqramadan.com/Islam-et-Homosexualite,10682.html?lang=fr. Consulted 3/22/2012. 2 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from French are my own. 4 Ramadan launched an international call for a moratorium on corporeal punishment, stoning, and the death penalty in the Islamic world, and has elsewhere been instrumental in stressing the existence of “Islamic Feminism,” a conjunction of terms that many staunch secularists and some feminists still refuse to accept. Ramadan, Tariq. "An International call for Moratorium on corporal punishment, stoning and the death penalty in the Islamic World". www.tariqramadan.com. http://www.tariqramadan.com/An-International-call-for,264.html. Consulted 4/11/2012. 5 Fourest, Caroline. Frère Tariq: Discours, stratégie, et méthode de Tariq Ramadan. Grasset et Fasquelle, 2004. 2 Ramadan’s “double-speak,” or his supposed tendency to say one palatable thing to a French or English-language audience and another, “unpalatable” thing to a Muslim one. Ramadan’s article attests to the fact that the issue of homophobia has been recognized as a significant flashpoint in the debate about Muslim immigration and its influence on European societies. It more particularly demonstrates awareness of what can be called “sexual vilification”: the deployment of an otherwise progressive feminist and LGBT-rights agenda for the purpose of xenophobic Othering. Ramadan’s characterization of the Islamic stance(s) on homosexuality is an important element in this debate. Ramadan states that homosexuality is religiously “condemned and forbidden,” and that this is “largely, the majority opinion of all spiritualities and of all religions, to which Islam is no exception,” a claim for which he cites a third party.7 But is that which Ramadan calls forbidden the same thing that his Western secular critics accuse him of 9 condemning? Why doesn't a theologian who has previously called for interpretation instead of dogmatism when it comes to women’s status attempt to do the same for sexual orientation, an issue his young constituents in Europe are ceaselessly confronted with? And what is the 7 Lévy, Isabelle. Soins et croyances: Guide pratique des rites, cultures et religions à l’usage des personnels de santé et des acteurs sociaux. Editions Estem, 2002, p.149. 9 It is nonetheless semantically problematic to assert that the word “homosexual” appears in the Koran, a claim for which I refer back to other scholars (see below). Ramadan, importantly, does not cite specific passages to make his case. Anything resembling the word’s referent—exclusive and identitarian sexual preference for the same sex—is even harder if not impossible to find in Koranic passages, without running into obstacles of anachronism. At the very least, the question involves a high-degree of undecidability. In one of the only non-sensationalist works on the topic, Khaled El-Rouayheb looks at Islamic legal traditions in the Arab-Islamic world between 1500 and 1800, and states that sodomy and homosexuality cannot be easily confused. He adds that "the relevant passages of the (Koran) do not specify which sexual acts had been committed by the people of Lot... ," and that, rather than employing a term like "homosexuality," jurists "operated instead with a set of concepts" like liwat, or sodomitic relations, and ubnah, men who desire anal intercourse (6). Taken together, these concepts still do not match up to "instances of one overaching phenomenon" (6). In this, El-Rouayheb does not differ so much from Michel Foucault and his distinction between "sodomites," as practitioners of sexual acts, and "homosexuals," a term which is much more extensive (and historically recent) in that it derives identity from acts. Here, the assertion that homosexuals didn't exist in the Arab-Islamic word paradoxically serves to demonstrate that male-male sexual relations were tolerated, in that "homosexuality" was not a legal category to be targeted. El-Rouayheb, Khaled. Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800. University of Chicago Press, 2005. Colvin, Tina and Savannah Stephenson. "Sex, Love, and Sin: Investigating Islamic Conceptions of Homosexuality in Response to The Kite Runner". www.uwf.edu. http://uwf.edu/bookclub/sexlovesin.html. Consulted 3/27/2012. 3 role of the “double phantasm,” which occurs when a subject or group is falsely represented, and then defines itself in counterpoint to that false representation, creating a third representation that may have little to do with the “truth”? Would such a situation arise when, for instance, Muslim thinkers re-historicize Arab-Islamic culture so that all elements of same- sex desire are erased, in response to Western representations which place disproportionate stress on the existence of these