Introduction

In this final chapter, I turn to an analysis of the interviews I conducted with queer Maghrebi French speakers of working-class and middle-class families whom I met through word-of-mouth, snowball sampling, or social media and online chat sites during my fieldwork between 2009 and 2014. I divide this chapter into three sections where each one is focused on a different case study and related interview transcriptions. First, I present “Nacir,” an Algerian-born man who was raised by generally secular and strong middle-class women – his mother and her sisters – who protected him like a “clan de lionnes” [a tribe of female lions] while growing up in Algiers. Like, Taia (Chapter 3), and Ben Attia (Chapter 4), Nacir tells a story that highlights the importance of filiation with and sense of rebellion and revolution he learned from his Algerian- French mother and aunts. When he immigrates to France, he rewrites his filial tale by reattaching himself to his Alsatian grandmother's homeland. Like the other queer Maghrebi French men in this book, Nacir situates himself at the crossroads of multiple scripts, temporalities, and traditions.

Next, I examine “Tahar,” a Tunsian-born man who grew up in a moderately religious Muslim family in a banlieue outside of Dreux in northern France. Like other queer Maghrebi French émigrés and citizens, he sees education as his best weapon to escape and free himself of hate and violence. He earns a scholarship and attends the Sorbonne as a college student and then receives a teaching assistantship in an American university where he completes his graduate studies. Eventually, Tahar returns to France and finds himself teaching Spanish language and culture in a public high school in the chic 16th district of Paris. In this context, he exploits his own intercultural and hybrid identity, coupled with the subversion and transgression he learned as an “étranger” [foreigner] both “at home” in France and then while living abroad. These life experiences allow him to adopt a queer pedagogy with his students in order to teach them how to critique their own middle-class values, hence weaving his transfilial ties and creating his own “monsters” (Halberstam, Queer Art).