| This dissertation examines the artistic and intellectual engagements of artists from the North African queer diaspora, by focusing on how these artists depict their queer North African childhoods, as well as their subsequent integration into Francophone European societies. It examines, generally, processes of queer identity formation, and more specifically, the ways in which this identity is forged through and by movement. The texts studied here largely represent semiautobiographical writing, and to a lesser degree, personal modes of filmmaking by the following artists: Mehdi Ben Attia, Rachid Boudjedra, Nouri Bouzid, Mohamed Choukri, Driss Chraibi, Karim Nasseri, Rachid O., and Abdellah Taia. The central argument of this dissertation is that the confluence of diasporic movement and non-normative sexuality, represented at once by the personal trajectories of these artists and the characters, themes, and structures they create, produces a dynamic relationship between representation and imagination that fundamentally rearticulates the past, present, and future of these works. The result is a queer and queered version of the past in which the disavowal of queer sexuality is not a requisite element of belonging to a home, family, or nation, as well as an imagined future in which subjects of non-normativity are valued and protected in the Islamicate societies of North Africa. Indeed, in these texts, belonging itself is put into motion, releasing it from the grasp of the exclusionary politics of nationalism and heteropatriarchy. Collectively, the texts examined here invite us to reconsider the symbolic values of home, family, and nation through the affects, and effects, of movement. The first chapter examines three generations' worth of North African cultural production in order to elaborate a theory of revelation as revolution, while each remaining chapter focuses on work from the queer diaspora. The second chapter identifies and examines a trope of queer happiness in the works of Ben Attia, O., and Taia; the third chapter focuses on transmigration and queer diasporic identity in the writing of O.; and the last chapter posits a theory of corporeal identification in the writing of Taia. |
