ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Maghrebi writers of fiction, sandwiched between the use of the French language – providing access to a Western audience – and the reality of Muslim-majority locales, have reacted to this import of a different cultural discourse on sexuality. Various contemporary representatives of Maghrebi literature in French have mediated a homosexual reality in their fiction and the Muslim closet in which it is set while crucially picturing it from the first-person perspective. Some of their writings challenge, however, not only the local attitude toward same-sex relations but also notions of sex qua social identity motivated in the West both through the nineteenth-century medicalization of sexuality and the more recent minority thinking behind sexual liberation. Their writings show that the hybrid Berber-Arab-Muslim- French Mediterranean culture of the Maghreb may in fact have a much less fixed concept of the gendered Other than the West generally assumes. Indeed, the frequently unstable Maghrebi subjectivities staged in many of these narratives deconstruct the post-independence homophobic official discourses of the North African nation-states and the traditional segregation of the sexes, but also the polarized hetero- and homonormative identitary discourses which hail from the West and segregate not sexes but sexual orientations.
