Jarrod Hayes' Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb is one book which might help us to understand these events because it usefully situates the entanglement of queer sexuality and nationhood in a closely related culture, that of the Maghreb or North Africa. Arguing that sexuality acts as a pole of national self-construction for the postcolonial state, Queer Nations demonstrates that postcolonial and queer studies share a common ground. Far from being a modish application of American-style identity-speak to a "native" culture, Queer Nations aims to develop a set of terms for understanding and analyzing the political valence of queer sexuality in the Maghrebin context as evident in the Francophone literary production of the postindependence period. Notably, Hayes' frequent reminder that contemporary American gay identities do not constitute a developmental end in themselves for African, and by extention other "third world", subjects is both refreshing and quite radical in its implicit suggestion that the study of Maghrebin marginal sexualities might fruitfully amplify the American conception of queer.
1991LAPride-Ektar125-1-5101Film_0037 - Queer Natio...
Spring1991-KodakEktar125Film_0011 - ACT UP Queer N...
Spring1991-KodakEktar125Film_0008 - ACT UP Queer N...Successfully binding together a vast body of literary and critical material, Hayes delivers readings of the often neglected novels of Djaout, Boudjedra and Sebbar, among others. He ventures a cogent critique of Fanon through an analysis of Fanon's essays on the Algerian family, showing that the vision of nationhood as necessarily entailing the consolidation of western-style compulsory heterosexuality only strengthens the hand of the national bourgeoisie, the very cadre of elites whose appropriation of the revolution Fanon warned against in his other writings. This critique emerges in his discussion of a novel, Mohammed Dib's Qui se souvient de la mer, which depicts the breakdown of gender norms in the outbreak of the Algerian war of independence and the radicalization of wives and mothers as bomb carriers. Hayes builds on his concise...