ABSTRACT
Trans studies scholar Nael Bhanji writes: ‘In these contours of citi-zenship, belonging, and migration, how do … borders themselves deterritorialise and reterritorialise us?’ Certainly, the borders of gender have a lot in common with those of ‘home’, for both gender and home maintain boundaries between those who ‘belong’ and those who do not. Similarly, Aren Aizura writes of the role of physical and symbolic travel and movement in gender transitions, arguing that the ‘journey out and return home narrative’ is key to understanding both migration and gender crossings. This chapter will take up similar concerns, working with a notion of home as both literal (as in physical location or ‘homeland’) and metaphoric (as in the feeling of being ‘at home’ in one’s body) through an analysis of two films: Merzak Allouache’s 2003 comedy Chouchou and Angelina Maccarone’s 2005 drama Un-veiled/Fremde Haut. Both films engage with intersections between migration, displacement, gender, and sexuality, and their attendant deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation that Bhanji describes. In their focus on liminal spaces, these two films speak to overlapping processes of transnational and transgender assimilation, exclusion, and aggregation. As they negotiate complex border-crossings across nation-states and across gender boundaries, the films’ migrant outsiders take on another gender presentation or gender identity than that assigned at birth. Allouache’s commercially successful comedy introduces us to a North African female-identified male-bodied migrant who arrives in France and soon begins to both present and identify as a woman, while Maccarone’s drama tells the story of an Iranian female who flees to Germany due to persecution as a lesbian but does not fit the profile of a ‘proper’ asylum-seeker and takes on the identity of a male friend with papers in order to stay in the country. The former concludes on an optimistic note of integration and a sense of being ‘at home’, while the latter may be less hopeful, leaving us wondering what will happen to the lead character upon returning back ‘home’ to Iran.
Both films collaborate with, but also subvert, dominant discourses and structures around migration, homeland, and heteronormativity, as well as notions of flexible citizenship, circuits of global capital, and cosmopolitanism. In this sense, they prompt similar questions around transgender, transnational, and transcultural experiences, which this chapter will take as its point of departure: how can we theorise intersections between migration and non-normative genders and sexualities in European postcolonial cinema? How do these films reflect yet also distort the contemporary social and political climate of non-European migrants arriving to Europe? How do they ‘trans’ – that is surpass, transcend, and cross – notions of gender, migration, and home?
