Dissident or Conformist Passing: Merzak Allouache’s Chouchou

Merzak Allouache’s 2003 Chouchou tells the story of a transidentified undocumented Algerian immigrant who has just arrived in Paris. Like Allouache’s other films, it invites the viewer to think about the articulation between culture and masculinity. More specifically, Chouchou presents us with unusually ambiguous narratives of passing and crossing-over that complicate the traditional French-Algerian postcolonial paradigm. To the extent that issues of gender and ethnicity are never separated, it is never clear whether Chouchou’s attempts to pass (as a woman or as a refugee) should or can be interpreted as moments of opposition or conformism. In Chouchou, cross-dressing both reiterates the norm and serves to highlight differences within masculinity and femininity as well as within ethnicity.

This paper analyses the film’s contribution to the recent debate about how Western democracies use their definition of sexual freedom as a political weapon. Does Chouchou avoid the risk of reinforcing the stereotypical opposition between the homophobic native land and the xenophobic adopted country? Or how does Allouache’s double critique of Algerian and French inhospitality to sexual or national others succeed in opening up new spaces? Neither femininity nor France constitutes an ideal or idealized destination for a migrant who must constantly renegotiate his objectives. The process of constantly deferred arrival also redefines Algeria as a multiple site of origin: just as Chouchou does not become a (Western) woman, he was never simply an Algerian (man). Chouchou thus invites us to ascertain to what extent the relationship between cross dressing, dissidence and/or conformism changes in each specific context.