The Gay Republic: Sexuality, Citizenship and Subversion in France (review)

This book examines the controversy leading to the passage of the PaCS (Pacte civil de solidarité) legislation in 1999 and the fundamental questions it raised about notions of French citizenship and the republic. McCaffrey does an excellent job of surveying the often complicated arguments set out by opponents of the law (Catholic Church, some psychoanalysts, some civil libertarians), but also the fissures within the gay community itself and amongst pro-PaCS spokesmen as to what injustices the law would actually address. The approach is oriented towards the social sciences, rather than literary or philosophical, but the questions raised defy disciplinary boundaries. Methodically evaluating a very large amount of material, produced by intellectuals and social scientists as well as the popular press, McCaffrey reaches judicious conclusions throughout. He wisely focuses not on what he calls intellectual squabbles (though a bit more on those squabbles, centring particularly on Eribon and Butler, would have been appreciated), but rather on social policy debates and wider questions of what he calls 'social space'. The expected intellectual figures appear and are cited approvingly (Bourdieu, Foucault, Patton), but many other of the spokespeople are closer to the ground (Bertho, Collin, Fassin, Borillo, Théry) and offer a fascinating debate on just what it means to be part of a minority that cannot banish its particularity to the arena of the private while the universal is touted as the golden mean. What makes this a very important book is the fact that time has caught up with its subject. The recent events in the Parisian banlieue and the current debate on immigration make its argument even more topical than when it was written. I suspect that this is not accidental. McCaffrey clearly saw that the questions being raised by the PaCS debate were not marginal or limited to special interests and he treats them as systematic of deep and long abiding problems in the French state. This was all made embarrassingly clear in the last year, proving that civil libertarians' demands for a civil partnership law were only the tip of the iceberg. Fundamental issues of exclusion in French republic thinking must be balanced with the responsibilities of citizenship as the world watches to see if the French solution can adapt to the times. The concept of traditional republican citizenship has to be broadened when borders are blurring between public and private, between natural and cultural definitions of gender and ethnicity, and between ideology and tradition. The alternatives to universalism are all discussed as well as strategies for contesting republican 'transcendence' of democratic 'immanence' (p. 195) and the book ends on a rather more political tone. Subversion from within the category of the universal, a category created by institutions, is possible and desirable and may be the only answer. This is a rich and promising book for use in courses on contemporary France, but also in queer theory, sociology and political science. The individual chapters stand on their own as discrete essays and can easily be excerpted to address specific topics.