Queer French: Globalization, Language, and Sexual Citizenship in France
Denis M. Provencher
Associate Professor, Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Visiting Scholar in Residence at Nottingham Trent University
Date: Wednesday 6th May 2009
Place: Samuel Alexander A102
Time: 4.15pm
Denis M. Provencher's Queer French (Ashgate, 2007) has made a highly original contribution to the study of sexual citizenship in contemporary France.
In this presentation, he will examine the tensions between US and French articulations of homosexuality and sexual citizenship as they emerge in various contemporary French popular culture genres and first-person narratives. These include national gay and lesbian news magazines, advertisements, AIDS and post-AIDS fiction, sexual travel novels, commercial French cinema, coming-out stories and map drawings of the "gay city" derived from ethnographic interviews.
In his research, he argues that contemporary French gay and lesbian cultures and their cultural productions rely on a set of long-standing French narratives that withstand US models of gay experience. He maintains that French gay experiences are mitigated through (gay) French language that draws on several canonical voices -- including Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre -- and various universalistic discourses -- based on a republican model of citizenship that does not celebrate "differentiated" or "individual" rights.
His work demonstrates how the (American) "one-size-fits-all" approach to sexual citizenship is complicated by issues of ethnicity, race and class whereby French gays and lesbians take up and reject to varying degrees notions such as "community" and belonging.
Organised by the Centre for the Research into the Visual Culture of the French Speaking World