New Imaginative Ethnographies

How do queer Maghrebi French men – French citizens of North African descent – and queer Maghrebi men – North African émigrés living in France – understand their same-sex desire? Do they talk about their understanding of same-sex longing and identity similarly to their “European French” counterparts when living in a postcolonial French context? My previous ethnographic work hints that they do not. I asked French gay men and lesbians of European descent to draw maps of “gay” or “lesbian” Paris in order to show me where they felt comfortable and to specify their sense of belonging in the city. In their sketches, they often highlighted their stories of strolling in arrondissements [districts] 1 through 4 of the French capital, including the Marais, however, they also explained how they felt free to move about the entire city. In contrast, when I met and interviewed “Samir,” one of only two self-identified “Français-Arabes” [French-Arabs] I recruited during my earlier work, he completely omitted the heart of the city and spoke of his preference for spending time in “mixed neighborhoods” (Queer French 184–91). Samir mentioned the “obligation” as a gay person to pass through the Marais, however, for him, this space did not always offer a warm welcome – both as a postcolonial queer in the “gay Marais” and a Muslim in the “Jewish Marais.” Samir's striking omission of the city center (Map 1) prompted me to want to investigate further the queer Maghrebi French experience and the present volume is in many ways a response to that erasure.

Queer Maghrebi French voices and faces remain largely absent from a variety of real-life and representational spaces in contemporary France and beyond. Clicking through an online issue of any gay and lesbian French magazine – such as Têtu.online and Yagg.com – will give the attentive reader a sense of this invisibility.