Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (review)

This book is not a study of sexuality per se but rather a work of literary criticism about the representations of marginal sexualities in the fictional universes of a number of contemporary novels written in French by male and female Maghrebian authors, including Albert Memmi, Mohammed Dib, Kateb Yacine, Lèila Sebbar, Tarah Ben Jelloun, and Assia Djebar. The Maghreb ("west of where the sun sets")—Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, all former French possessions—was constructed, or "troped" as Hayes says, by colonialist discourse as part of the Orient, this despite the fact "the word itself refers to the western part of the Arab world, and most of the Maghreb is actually to the west of France."

Using a combination of approaches, including deconstruction, queer, and postcolonial theories, Hayes manages to touch upon many issues involving marginal sexualities, not just in the novels but also in the historical and contemporary realities represented by his corpus of literary works. He avoids sexual tourism in studying Maghrebian literature, although he does discuss Jean Genet and Roland Barthes as well as Balzac and Flaubert in relation to the construction of Orientalism and its readings of Maghrebian sexualities. Positing the homophobia to be found in both colonial and nationalist discourses, Hayes shows how the novels analyzed serve to uncover—or unveil—the homosexuality repressed by the official doxa: "When postindependence official discourses attempt to fit a single source of national identity and legislate a people's roots, they also marginalize, exclude, and even exterminate those who cannot trace their history to these roots in order to consolidate the power of the new elite. Many novels counter these official prescriptions of national origins, not by uprooting identity, but by challenging official roots with alternative ones."

Using the Freudian concept of the return of the repressed as theorized by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx (1993), Hayes demonstrates that homosexuality "haunts" these novels, just as it "queers" Maghrebian societies:

By emphasizing "the haunting or the return of revenants," Derrida offers a clue as to how "hauntology" is related to queering. Revenant, one French word for ghost, is also the present participle of the verb to return or come back, revenir; ghosts return, then like the repressed. When this repression is that of sexuality (as it so often is, in Freudian as well as nationalist narratives), the ghosts that come back are sexual ones. Since non normative sexualities suffer repression to a far greater extent than normative ones, these sexual ghosts are often queer. Queering as a form of hauntology thus exposes the connection between sexual repression and political oppression, and the topos of this queering/hauntology, for the purposes of this study, is the Nation.

"Unveiling national and sexual secrets in public to rewrite the Nation of nationalist discourse as a queer nation" is, according to Hayes, the task of the postcolonial writer of fiction. Refusing to limit the notion of queerness to Western homosexuality, he shows how "[w]henever specific examples of 'Oriental sex' are examined closely, they will also be much queerer than any [existing] paradigm could allow for." In other words, "the [Maghrebian] Nation is always already queer." For example, apparently there is a "common belief among the Arabic-speaking mountaineers of North Morocco that a boy cannot learn the Koran well unless a scribe commits pederasty with him," according to a quotation from Stephen Murray's 1997 study of nineteenth-century reports of Islamic homosexualities.

Hayes's remarks on the hammam for women and even the harem are particularly interesting since he demonstrates how both of them can be constructed as queer spaces. Eve Sedgwick's notion of a continuum from homosociality to homosexuality, including homoeroticism, is refined here as Hayes posits the existence of a "continuum of continuums," depending on each society, the groups and individuals of...