ABSTRACT
The phrase ‘Eastern Boys’ may easily conjure up an undifferentiated mass of orientalised, racialised, and sexualised young men of Eastern-European, North-African, and Middle-Eastern descent; indeed, the denomination may serve as a subheading on an escort or porn site. However, the narration and camerawork of the 2013 French film Eastern Boys (Robin Campillo) takes care to bestow a qualified individuality on one Eastern boy in particular, starting from the opening scenes in which protagonist Daniel Arthuis seeks out the singular object of his desire, Marek, from a gang of undocumented hustlers soliciting clients at the Gare du Nord in Paris. This individualising trajectory culminates at the ending of the film, when Daniel adopts his former escort Marek as his legal son under his real Chechen name of Rouslan Guerasiev, affording him a new home, family, and citizenship in one go. This chapter traces the specific terms, conditions, and foreclosures that inform the equivocal ‘happy end’ of Rouslan’s individualisation and naturalisation. What constellation of desire, hospitality, kinship, domesticity, and governmentality enables the transition of Marek/Rouslan from illegal sex-worker to son and citizen? What are the costs and damages of that outcome? How are bonds of desire and kinship distributed and redistributed through, as well as in response to, European immigration in this film?
Two lines of further inquiry pertinent to the film are considered. The first concerns the debated sociality of gay sexuality. On the one hand, none other than Michel Foucault argued for the sociopolitical richness of homosexuality as a ‘way of life’ that might project ‘new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force’, potentially resulting in new forms of relationality, community, and kinship. ‘Why shouldn’t I adopt a friend who’s ten years younger than I am? And even if he’s ten years older?’, Foucault questioned. On the other hand, authors like Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman have advanced what has become known as the ‘anti-social thesis’: the notion that gay sexuality inherently implies a negation of society that is roughly analogous to the Freudian death drive. Rather than pick a side in this debate, the chapter aims to investigate how Eastern Boys maps out the conditions and constraints under which same-sex desire might negate or reimagine the social. Does Daniel’s adoption of Rouslan constitute a homophobic mimicry of the nuclear family or the queer reinvention of a normative institution? The second line of inquiry frames the film in the problematic of what Jasbir Puar has termed ‘homonationalism’ or the ‘Muslim or gay binary’: the idea that the homosexual other is all too frequently understood as nominally white, while the racial other is regarded as straight as well as axiomatically homophobic. How does Eastern Boys imagine the partitioning or continuity of race and sex? And why does Rouslan’s revelation of his Chechen war trauma coincide with the waning of Daniel’s desire, triggering the fundamental transformation of their relationship?
