What's Queer about Europe?: Productive Encounters and Re-enchanting Paradigms 9780823255382

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W h a t ’s Q u e e r a b o u t E u r o p e ?

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What’s Queer about Europe? Productive Encounters and Re-enchanting Paradigms

Edited by

Mireille Rosello and Sudeep Dasgupta

fordham university press New York 2014

Copyright © 2014 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data What’s queer about Europe? : productive encounters and re-enchanting paradigms / edited by Mireille Rosello and Sudeep Dasgupta. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8232-5535-1 (hardback) — isbn 978-0-8232-5536-8 (paper) 1. Queer theory— Europe. 2. Europe— Civilization. I. Rosello, Mireille. II. Dasgupta, Sudeep. hq76.3.e8w43 2014 306.7601094 — dc23 2013016309 Printed in the United States of America 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

contents

Acknowledgments Introduction. Queer and Europe: An Encounter

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sudeep dasgupta and mireille rosello queer histories: imagining other european constructions

(Same-Sex) Marriage and the Making of Europe: Renaissance Rome Revisited

27

gary ferguson

A Case of Mistaken Identity: Female Russian Social Revolutionaries in Early-Twentieth-Century Switzerland

48

dominique grisard

Straight Migrants Queering European Man

69

nacira guénif queering euro-global politics

Queering European Sexualities Through Italy’s Fascist Past: Colonialism, Homosexuality, and Masculinities

81

sandra ponzanesi

Queer, Republican France, and Its Euro-American “Others”

91

lucille cairns from european grand narratives to queer counter-stories

Sick Man of Transl-Asia: Bruce Lee and Queer Cultural Translation

117

paul bowman

What’s Queer about Remy, Ratatouille, and French Cuisine? laure murat

136

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Contents

Pathos as Queer Sociality in Contemporary European Visual Culture: François Ozon’s Time to Leave

148

emma wilson

Queer/Euro Visions

171

carl stychin

Notes Bibliography List of Contributors Index

189 213 233 237

acknowledgments

We would like to thank our authors, who accepted a potentially challenging invitation to consider what is Queer about Europe. They generously accepted the challenge to tailor their current research and sent us thoughtprovoking and inspiring contributions. The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam provided financial support and a stimulating research environment. Special thanks to the participants of the annual ASCA Theory Seminar. The book developed as a sub-project of a research group that met under the aegis of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and the Institute for History and Culture. We thank the participants in the “Europeanizing Spaces” project for stimulating discussions. We want to thank Mike Katzberg for his patience and meticulous editing of the manuscript. The detailed and constructive reports of the two readers of the manuscript enriched the introduction and general structure of the book. We were touched by their collegiality and generosity. We thank Helen Tartar and Tom Lay at Fordham University Press for their support and encouragement from the early stages of the project.

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W h a t ’s Q u e e r a b o u t E u r o p e ?

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introduction

Queer and Europe: An Encounter Sudeep Dasgupta and Mireille Rosello

Neither American, nor Dutch, nor French, nor German, nor British, nor Swiss, we proclaim ourselves Queer Europeans. But unlike Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, the authors of the 1989 In Praise of Creoleness, we do not write in praise of Queer Europe.1 Rather, we wish to interrogate the encounter between Queer and Europe. We are concerned that Europe as a project and an embattled reality, and Queer as a paradigm and discipline, are often met with skepticism. A sense of being fraught, perhaps increasingly irrelevant, even passé, makes both Europe and Queer appear not very urgent as issues to be thought through, let alone brought into an encounter. But precisely this seeming lack of urgency and relevance is what the book explores. The urgency of producing this encounter thus stems from a critique of the rhetoric of disenchantment that both paradigms sometimes invoke. The book is an urgent call for rethinking and reframing these two terms as interventions in our present. It is in this sense that we are in search for Queer Europeans. Our objective is to examine the connection between Queer and Europe and the politicized affects or values that get attached to the ideas of the old, the obsolete, the new, and the brand new. A quick sketch of some of 1

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those features might be in order. In the midst of the ongoing economic crises, with failing European economies and inter-European paralysis on how to handle the politics of this economic meltdown, anti-Europeanists have been given plentiful reasons for fueling chauvinist, rightwing, and nationalist agendas.2 When, in 2005, the Dutch and the French refused to ratify the proposed Constitution of the European Union, these rejections were framed through cultural and economic nationalism. These Eurocritics on the Right are not our primary concern. Euro-skeptics on the Left, however, with their reliance on populist invocations of “the people,” responsiveness to grassroots activism, hostility to the bureaucracy in Brussels, and urgent anti-capitalist criticism, prove a far more challenging set of interlocutors given our desire in this book to revisit and productively provoke an encounter between these two disillusioned paradigms. For example, when Europe is equated with the European Union’s bureaucracy, “Brussels” is accused of micro-managing member states and of coming up with policies that are either irrelevant to the local populations or downright harmful to their way of life. The core of the supranational entity is perceived as a centralizing supra-state from which citizens are more and more alienated. Elie Barnavi laments the fact that Europe is “frigid” (Barnavi 2008), and both Rosi Braidotti (an Italian feminist based in the Netherlands) and Orhan Pamuk (a Turkish Nobel-Prize author) have deplored the fact that Europe no longer makes us dream (Pamuk 2011, Braidotti 2003, Andrijasevic 2003). Analysts who take into account the history of the formation of the European Union suggest that contemporary Europe may be the victim of its success: Originally conceived as the solution to recurring conflicts between nation states, Europe as a political and economic entity has reached an objective that is no longer perceived as an exciting goal. As Thomas Ferenczi puts it: Europe used to be a challenge, to represent hope. Now it is selfevident, banal. For the younger generations who have not been involved in postwar controversies, Europe is life as usual. The dream has come true. As a result, even if rare are those who reject the European project, enthusiasm is no longer to be expected. Routine has replaced adventure.3

“Reconciliation” within Europe is no longer an issue, intra-European peace has become something of a reality, so that the main reason that led the founding fathers of Europe to embark on a political adventure seems to have lost its relevance and urgency, especially after the fall of the Berlin

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Wall in 1989. The original desire to make sure that no conflict would erupt within Europe is no longer a priority even if the dream can be perceived, in retrospect, as the limited ambition to reconcile those nations involved in the first and second world wars. Recent events such as the war in Yugoslavia, as Edgar Morin argues, do not threaten the myth of an internally peaceful Europe (Morin 1996). The philosopher regrets Europe’s political powerlessness and the fact that no awareness of a desire for a common destiny is emerging (Morin 1987). Europe’s international politics is equally fraught. Europe polices its internal and external borders (Gunduz 2010, Taras 2009) while distressed activists and thinkers can’t help noticing the relentless rise of xenophobia and Islamophobia. A new myth has emerged: that of Fortress Europe. The process of enlargement only reinforces the exclusionary borders, which are geographically displaced and are not redefined. As the borders between states become invisible or transparent for some, the supranational border turns into a redoubtable obstacle for those who encounter it both inside and outside of Europe. Some Europeans experience the loosening of border controls as an increasing lack of insecurity, as demonstrated by the recent controversies around free movement within the Schengen countries. Europe does not protect them from what they see as the unstoppable flow of migrants whose ethnic, religious, or economic identity is perceived as a threat to their way of life. Other Europeans fear that Europe’s underexplored colonial past is re-emerging in the center of globalized urban zones (Balibar 2001, 38– 42). The narrative of reconciliation, which may have seemed to bear the promise of a generous form of postnationalism (Habermas 2001), has been replaced by postcolonial melancholia, national or even regional retrenchment, and a rhetoric of fear and suspicion about those nonEuropeans who represent a generalized threat to European values. Others live in fear of terrorism or of religious fundamentalism, and of losing their national or cultural identity. They are unwilling to hear Derrida’s plea that Europe find or become the “other heading”: As long as Europe constructs the stranger and foreigner (inside and outside) as threatening, it cannot work through the double imperative of remembering itself as present and past while opening up to that non-European otherness that already constitutes its present and past (Derrida 1992, 13–14). The present weariness and suspicion of Europe has its historical precedents, some of which presciently foresaw the forked path that confronted any imagining of Europe’s future journey. In the “Vienna address” of May 1935, Edmund Husserl mapped either a “downfall” or a “rebirth” in the

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context of what he called “the smoldering fire of despair over the West’s mission of humanity” (Husserl 1970, 7). Today, the twin discourses of rebirth and despair are encountered in many quarters while “the West’s mission of humanity” has gained a new lease on life in the context of the so-called “war on terror.” A resurgent Europe follows the same dialectic of despair and rejuvenation in a dramatically different geopolitical order. In “Edmund Husserl and the Crisis of Europe,” Caitlin Smith notices that “the inner heart of the text [is] . . . the problem of evil” (Smith 2006, 29). Like rebirth and death, Evil emerges as the other face of Reason, regarded in the 1930s as one of the crowning achievements of European science. The politics of science and the morality of its deployment frame much of the sympathetic and critical discourses on Europe. It manifests in the tracking of “illegals” through high-tech surveillance, and the war on terror throughout Europe. The uncertain line between Reason and Evil re-emerges. It is in this context that an engagement with queer perspectives becomes productive. We argue that both queer politics and queer theory might have reached a turning point in terms of their urgency, efficacy, and usefulness. The disappointment with the possible future of Europe is not dissimilar to the ongoing critique and rhetoric of disillusionment among queers. Queer movements have very quickly become the victim of the relative success that Queer Theory has enjoyed in academic circles in the United States. It may be hard to remember that the original pairing between “queer” and “theory” was provocative when Teresa de Lauretis coined the phrase in 1991. The echo that university structures were able to generate led to rapid institutionalization. Queer theory was both new and recognizable by scholars involved in poststructuralism and theorists interested in going beyond the identity politics of LGBT and feminist discourses. Now, what used to sound like an oxymoron has lost its incongruity: As a quasi discipline, Queer Theory is not immune to instrumentalization. Yet Queer Theory contains its own critique and is quite capable of articulating its own historicization and to ask “What’s Queer about Queer studies now?”4 Queer discourses question the way in which queer objects are conceptualized and articulated. For, contrary to what readers who are not familiar with the field may think, Queer Theory has never been reducible to sexuality let alone to the sexual politics of gays and lesbians. Reflecting on what Queer Theory has found or finds relevant is part of a debate that goes on in many disciplines. For some Queer critics, the decade during which North American activists and scholars mobilized against the American state’s indifference to AIDS constitutes the most authentic or quintes-

Introduction

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sential queer moment. Others disagree. In the United States, many regret that Queers now concentrate on the wrong object when they argue in favor of gay marriage or the presence of gays in the military. Yet this (sometimes strategic) simplification ignores that queer discourses are internally divided. The lack of intersectionality between sexual and racial politics, which exaggerates the role of white middle class English-speaking gay men has always been critiqued from within queer discourses (Muñoz 1999). The fear of queer commodification exists within queer communities (Velázquez 2010) and the United States does not hold a monopoly on Queer. Paradoxically, the increasing (if uneven) recognition of sexual minority rights within nation states and at the European level produces new challenges for queer politics. Rather than simply seeing the (ambiguous) state recognition of sexual minority rights as an unequivocal gain, queer politics faces the new challenge of how this supra-state European incorporation of such rights reproduces existing class and race hierarchies, and sometimes explicitly furthers xenophobia. What we identify as political, cultural, or theoretical “changes” revolve around issues of who will be included or excluded by the reconfiguration of Queer and of Europe. The articulation of migration and sexual politics and its urgent European component is precisely what queer discourse helps us with. The politics of asylum, refugees, immigration politics, and sexual rights constitute one nexus where this reconfiguration of Queer and Europe is urgently needed (see Guénif in this volume, Cervulle and Rees 2010, Butler 2009, Puar 2007). It is therefore important to examine the conditions of emergence of what are or appear to be new, forward-looking, and progressive critical moves. No discourse on Queer or Europe is going to be credible otherwise. The ability to evolve and reassess one’s own parameters has always been a given within Queer Theory. As early as 1993, Judith Butler writes, in Bodies That Matter: And if identity is a necessary error, then the assertion of queer will be necessary as a term of affiliation, but it will not fully describe those it purports to represent. As a result, it will be necessary to affirm the contingency of the term to let it be vanquished by those who are excluded by the term but who justifiably expect representation by it, to let it take on meanings that cannot now be anticipated by a younger generation whose political vocabulary may well carry a very different set of investments. (Butler 1993, 230)

But once the principle of change is accepted, the issue arises of which change is deemed desirable. How can we, while evolving, remain faithful

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to something that remains politically and ethically precious even if it becomes, for a while, unrecognizable and illegible?

What Exactly Is Queer about Queer Europe? Could it then be that one of the ways of nurturing what is politically and culturally desirable is to split Queer and Europe into very specific units of meaning that focus on what exactly in each of the two paradigms is still, today, relevant and productive? Queer analysts have already provided us with useful critiques of what they see as the most problematic aspects of queer discourses. Asked to comment on the relationship between globalization and queer, David Halperin and Dennis Altman both reflect upon which aspects of queer discourses are likely to gain or lose their critical edge. In 1996 (and perhaps we should write “as early as 1996”), Altman writes: I would argue that “queer” is an enormously useful term for aesthetic criticism; a film like Orlando or The Crying Game can be described as “queer,” meaning precisely that they unsettle assumptions and preconceptions about sexuality and gender and their inter-relationship. I am less convinced that the term provides us with a useful political strategy or even a way of understanding power relations. (Altman 1996)

And in his response to Altman, Halperin implicitly focuses on queer in academic discourse when he suggests that the word has lost some of its original force: Of course there remains much to worry about in the current hegemony of “queer theory”—not least that its institutionalisation, its consolidation into an academic discipline, constitutes a betrayal of its radical origins. . . . Even the scandalous term “queer” became respectable through its association with “Theory” . . . Once conjoined with “theory,” then, “queer” loses its offensive, vilifying tonality and subsides into a harmless generic qualifier, designating one of the multiple departments of academic theory. (Halperin 1996)

On the other hand, the splitting of queer into very specific and selfcontained bundles of meaning risks following a quasi disciplinary logic that ignores the constant contamination between various definitions of the words Queer and Europe. From Altman’s and Halperin’s perspective, it obviously makes sense to concentrate exclusively on one specific period and context (in this case, the coining of queer by Teresa de Lauretis as a

Introduction

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critical response to gay and lesbian studies and the embedding of queer theory in North American academic circles [de Lauretis 1991]). Distancing themselves from some of the incarnations of the queer movement, they are able to express loyalty to its original goals and avoid critical complacency. Europeanists who are disillusioned by what Europe is (not) becoming are likely to adopt the same strategy. Choosing a limited definition of which aspects of Queer and Europe we focus on would solve one of the potential problems of our attempt to pair two words that may at first seem disparate and unconnected: Emphasizing “what is queer about Europe” could mean celebrating dissidence or progressive practices and thought in Europe. This is not, however, the strategy that we have adopted. Instead, we chose not to decide, at this point, which facets of Queer and Europe are our specific objects of study and therefore the static recipients of our critical gaze. The encounter between Queer and Europe turns them into theoretical engines that organize our way of analyzing and reading. In this book, Queer and Europe are the names of two powerful but ill-defined paradigms or constellations of trans-disciplinary discourses and practices. In the case of Europe, we do not feel bound to strict distinctions between the European Union and the idea of Europe, between old or new Europe: Prematurely accepting such distinctions would pre-empt an analysis of the conditions that create them. Similarly, we refrain from immediately distinguishing between Queer Theory and queer activism, queer subjects and queer practices, North American queer discourses and its others. The essays themselves, in their conjunctural modes of figuring Europe and Queer, produce what the two terms might mean, rather than each essay being an example of some already formulated paradigm. Put differently, the essays produce Queer and Europe at the nexus of the specific concerns they bring up and then analyze. In this sense, Queer would mean precisely skewing received perspectives on what Queer and Europe mean and have meant. Keeping Queer and Europe as broad as possible is not meant to downplay the significance of critics who have focused on the difference between aesthetic or political contexts. And we are well aware that Europe functions differently if it is looked at within specific fields of study (Europe as a historical concept, Europe as a continent that geographers map differently according to their own parameters, Europe as a mythological narrative of a kidnapped woman). Each conceptualization of the words casts a long ideological shadow on all the other contexts in which Queer and Europe are used.

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Our objective is not to reach a better definition of each of the terms. Instead, our hypothesis is that the encounter between a chaotic set of discourses that form the Queer and European constellation will constitute a mutual critique of some of the parameters that organized them as cultural discourses, and empower or disempower those cultural agents who work as (non)Queers or (non)Europeans. Encounters are both threats whose consequences may be neutralized or carried out, and opportunities that reveal ideological investments. By framing the collection of essays as an encounter between two disillusioned paradigms, our aim is to exacerbate rather than conceal the destabilizing consequences of conjoining Queer and Europe. The essays in this book in very different ways reveal the threats posed, and the productive consequences produced by an encounter between the two paradigms. The book as a whole produces a constellation of perspectives that construct a not-yet recognizable encounter between Queer and Europe. All normativity, heteronormativity included, involves some structural framing of the threat posed by encounters (Sedgwick 2003; Butler 1997; Herdt 2009). Encounters, whether personal, world-historical, intellectual, aesthetic, or mundane and accidental threaten some notion of stability of those doing the encountering. Querying the attempts through which these frames ward off the threat of encounters could be understood as a form of queering. In “Queering Buen Amor,” Gregory Hutcheson suggests that both literature and literary studies continue to be crucial in establishing (hetero-)normativity (Hutcheson 2006). The encounter with a literary text, and the discourses generated by critics on these texts, becomes a kind of crisis-management experience where the right kind of interpretations foreclose wrong ones. At stake in Hutcheson’s essay is the construction of Hispanic culture as integral to “European” culture. The threats posed, and ushered away in this context, are the Moorish influences and sexual ambiguities that the text contains. Queering Buen Amor involves two things. First, by underlining the centrality of both Moorish influences and of nonnormative sexuality, Hutcheson queers the text. The effect is to make Europe rotate on a broken axis with Spain producing the break through an encounter with non-normative sexualities and the Moors. More important than just “including” the Arabic and homosexual elements integral to the text, Hutcheson’s argument links the intellectual labor of critics to the struggle over the framing of European culture and its components. His essay labors at chipping away the presumed location of Hispanic literature and by consequence the solidity of Europe’s self-image produced by normative critics.

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Introduction

The present volume takes its bearings around queerness precisely in those terms. It produces readings that produce neither an accretive logic through which Europe needs to be understood as the sum of nonacknowledged encounters (the “recovery of lost histories” paradigm), nor a replacement logic whereby one paradigm must be substituted by another (queer) one. Queer stands for a theoretical, historical, and empirical acknowledgement of the messy, threatening, threateningly productive, and productively provocative character of encounters. Reading these essays is one example of such encounters. What is not at stake in queerness is a theoretical replacement-logic that would parallel a historical logic of replacement (“Straight Europe is actually Queer Europe”). The theoretical thrust of the anthology is not to produce paradigms such as “deconstruction,” “hybridity,” “liminality,” and “alterity.” The risk posed by such paradigms is that at a meta-level they reinstate the solidity of one normative paradigm by another: the queer one itself becomes normative. Queering is a permanent process that undermines normativity at the same time that it wards off the paradoxical threat of reinstating non-normativity as a desired and stable program. To that extent, queering possesses the perpetual uncertainty of a negative dialectical habit of mind without hypostasizing and reifying litanies of in-betweenness or the interval. The essays in this collection are productive interruptions that generate intellectual and political queries into both normative and non-normative programs that are on their way to becoming normative. Eschewing vanguardist proposals of paradigm changes, the essays produce particular prismatic perspectives of multiple encounters between Queer and Europe. The essays welcome rather than avoid the threats posed by the encounter between these two paradigms, opening them up to “multiple meanings, to successive rewritings and overwritings which are generated as so many levels and as so many supplementary interpretations . . . less as a technique for closing the text off and for repressing aleatory or ‘aberrant readings’ and senses, than as a mechanism for preparing such a text for further ideological investment” ( Jameson, 1981, 29–30).

Post-Queer Europe? Another strategy could be a radical repudiation of queer altogether. Why not simply give up on “queer,” declare it an obsolete label and hang on to what the word represents? One option would be to find a new word for what Queer stood for, and what still needs to be done.

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To say that Queer is obsolete risks imposing a definition of “old” and “new” that presupposes a certain type of temporality based on a linear teleology. This “from old to new” narrative is also the basis of Western grand narratives of progress. To uncritically adopt such implicit definitions of what a supposedly universal and a-historical Time does to old and new would mean reproducing those paradigms that are questioned by scholars who work on queer temporalities (Halberstam 2005). Queer, like Europe, is caught up in a complex dialectical tension between old and new and between discourses that seek to either celebrate or condemn old or new without examining the reasons why each adjective is alternatively presented as the preferred pole of the binary opposition. When Léon Gontran Damas, Leopold Senghor, and Aimé Césaire introduced “Negritude,” they sought to reappropriate, rather than move away from, blackness and the derogatory associations attached to black skins. And in spite of the many critiques that the movement has generated, their efforts have successfully displaced the hegemony of discourses that naturalize whiteness as the equivalent of modernity, culture, and civilization. Strategically, this type of affirmative rhetoric presupposes a form of unlearning, a form of forgetting of the current associations behind a concept. The dissociation between blackness and negative connotations is a decolonization of the mind that both whites and their non-white others must share for the concept to do its cultural work. The change of paradigm involves, at least at some level, a series of felicitous speech acts that allow emergent concepts to lose their radicality and acquire a familiarity that makes them function as shared references among communities who may not even agree with the details of anti-racist or anti-discriminatory agendas. The word “queer” has gone through a comparable cultural journey so that some of those who proudly assert, in the twenty-first century, “I am queer” never had to unlearn that the word referring to homosexuals originally comes from the old continent: Sedgwick takes the trouble to trace the word back to its many roots when she writes that queer “comes from IndoEuropean root -twerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart” (Sedgwick 1991, xii). Like Queer, however, Negritude has always been criticized from what may appear to be the inside of the movement. Even anticolonialist thinkers were quick to express doubts about what they saw as Negritude’s romanticism and essentialism or political limits. Frantz Fanon was suspicious of Negritude’s idealization of a constructed black irrationality or sense of

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rhythm and feared that it constituted a misguided appeal to the white world (Fanon 120 –5). And yet, it is the same Fanon who strongly objected when Sartre suggested that Negritude was a minor moment in a dialectic progression, that it was a means towards an end (Fanon 135). Negritude’s objective is to disappear when its work is done. It wants to destroy itself.5 Today, we could argue that Sartre was right and that Negritude has not survived a given historical moment. In 2013, no self-respecting critic would find it palatable to claim Negritude as a contemporary theoretical tool. On the other hand, it is just as easy to argue that Negritude constitutes one of the sediments of what became postcolonial studies and even globalization studies and that it constitutes a body of knowledge from which one can dis-identify without, however, rejecting it. Negritude has not disappeared; it is now perceived as a historical moment in a fight against racism that is far from being over. In the future, Queer may or may not be the name that some will wish to reserve to a specific historical moment. But if we take Fanon’s objection to Sartre seriously, it might be useful to keep in mind that the way in which Queer evolves does not have to be predicted. It is precisely in this sense that the essays’ configuration of Queer and Europe are conjunctural, intervening in a specific moment in the history of queer theory and in the intellectual and political debates around Europe. The recognition of the rights of queers within the European Union, however scattered and reluctant, is a contemporary example of the ongoing attempt to produce enlarged notions of community with shared reference points. At the same time, the rise of homonationalism, in countries such as the Netherlands and Germany, illustrates the fraught relationship between sexual politics and racial/ethnic differences, particularly in the context of immigration (Puar 2007 and Haritaworn 2011).6 The work these two terms are made to do in the readings that follow are “aleatory” qua the present historical moment in the sense that they open up “aberrant readings” without conferring an ahistorical meaning on non-normativity. Like Queer, Europe is caught up in a complex dialectic tension between old and new that makes us look again at what we want to do with old and new—and with temporalities more broadly. “From a geopolitical point of view,” Michel Foucher reminds us, “Europe is not an old continent, it is the newest.” Do such apparent paradoxes valorize what is new or deconstruct the binary? When Lévi-Strauss writes Tristes Tropiques in 1961, he makes an intriguing observation about how New World and Old Word cities distribute themselves along the old and new continuum. In his eyes,

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the cities that he has visited on the North American continent share a curious characteristic: “they pass from first youth to decrepitude with no intermediary stage” (Lévi-Strauss 100). The brand-new high rises, symbol of modernity and progress (or even of a new and improved New World modernity) seem to age prematurely. They show signs of “decrepitude” before acquiring the noble status of ancient monuments. The way in which Lévi-Strauss describes them privileges one definition of “old”: decrepitude connects old age to diseases, diminished faculties, decay, and visible signs of imminent mortality rather than to experience and wisdom. Lévi-Strauss, anticipating his readers’ objection, stresses that he does not stereotypically lament Sao Paulo or New York’s lack of historical depth. He does not equate “history” with the presence of familiar Roman vestiges and does not confuse their absence with a lack of civilization in general: If I err it is in the opposite sense: as these are new cities, and cities whose newness is their whole being and their justification, I find it difficult to forgive them for not staying new forever. The older a European city is, the more highly we regard it; in America, every year brings with it an element of disgrace. For they are not merely newly built; they are built for renewal, and the sooner the better. [. . .] Certain European cities are dying off slowly and peacefully; the cities of the New World have a perpetual high temperature, a chronic illness which prevents them, for all their everlasting youthfulness, from ever being entirely well. What astonished me in Sao Paulo in 1935, and in New York and Chicago in 1941, was not their newness, but the rapidity with which time’s ravages had set in.

Lévi-Strauss’s reading of New World cities condemns them to perpetual brand-newness. The specific way in which they grow old is devalued. And yet, the text’s originality is to avoid a widespread prejudice against age in general and to develop a comparison between two ways of ageing. Unfavorable to the New World, it recognizes the existence of a powerful norm: Old European cities are admired because their way of being “old” is associated with permanence and tradition. Time works in their favor and paradoxically gives them the added value of permanence and stability. The intellectual paradigms that organize our thinking around Queer and Europe do not refer to bodies that are born, grow old, and die. But just as Lévi-Strauss does not become incomprehensible when he implicitly describes cities as organic entities affected by processes that we normally associate with the natural world, our appreciation of the value of ideas and theories sometimes follows the same principle. Does the fact that Queer

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thinking emerged in North America make Queer more susceptible to obsolescence not because of some intrinsic quality but because of our tendency to look for signs of perhaps premature “decrepitude” in the New World? Something about the way (old) Europe constantly changes is a paradoxical guarantee of timelessness, whereas the ways in which (new) Queer evolves risk being perceived as forms of intellectual decrepitude.7 Europe and Queer are not so much either old and new but rather caught in a continuum that needs to be articulated, again and again, in the presence of changing political agendas and changing objects. If we recognize the continuum, it may not be so difficult to argue that both Queer and Europe are too old and too new, depending on the often invisible historicized hierarchy that organizes the opposition between the two words. Queer and Europe are too old in some spaces and too new in others.8 Queer is too old in the States where it emerged as a vibrant cultural movement, gained currency among academics and activists, and now seems to have lost its ability to provoke and destabilize the norm or normativity. Queer is new and perhaps suspiciously too new in Europe where it has only recently appeared and risks appearing as a derivative import from the United States. As for Europe, it is too old and too new depending on which voice seeks to define it, from within or from without. And contrary to what happens in Lévi-Strauss’s text, references to “old” Europe are not necessarily favorable. From a postcolonial perspective, privileging what is “new” about Europe could mean repudiating its previously dominant Eurocentric and colonial mentalities and working through postcolonial melancholia. But anyone can plausibly re-invent and claim new Europe from a clearly conservative political point of view as recent historical events have amply demonstrated. In 2003, the then–U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld both created and implicitly condemned “old Europe” when France and Germany refused to support the invasion of Iraq. In this configuration, Europe was split into two camps and old and new were used to dismiss those parts of Europe that did not wish to ally themselves with the international and illegal policies pursued by the United States. Here, “old Europe” is not a tautology that acknowledges the continent’s historical depth.9 It is a rhetorical strategy that smuggles the positive values attached to the idea of novelty into a political debate. Allies represent what is forward-looking about “new Europe,” and the adventurous spirit of the American pioneer is implicitly re-imported back to those countries that (supposedly heroically) resist the “old” historic European core and do not let the founding nations dictate their law to the margins.

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The rhetoric of linearity and teleology that separates old and new Europe not only hides the simplistic association between new and desirable, old and obsolete, but also obscures the fact that each part of Europe is both old and new in different ways and struggling to come to terms with what, about new and old, can be celebrated or critiqued. At a more mundane, if no less complex, level of everyday lived experience, these terms are articulated through multiple configurations of temporalities. Harry Harootunian articulates this temporal linkage between the larger discursive units of the (supra-)national state, political power, and the lived experience of those subjected to and negotiating with institutional power with the term “noncontemporaneous contemporaneity” (Harootunian: 2007, 477). He argues: If . . . the present is realigned with empirical life (history itself ) so that the abstracted lifeworld is replaced by a lived everyday constantly shaped by the movements of the body interacting with its world and liberated from the imprisonment of internal consciousness—in short, worldliness and reflexivity— one can then imagine a model of the present thick with different practices from other modes of production, mixed temporal regimes declaring their affiliation with different times now passed but still retained with their corresponding political demands. (477)

The “collision of temporalities”(474) is another way of thinking the too old and the too new as occupying the same space-time nexus of our contemporary moment, a nexus of “mixed temporalities.” If both Europe and Queer need to be rethought outside the discourse of developmental time, one of the fundamental challenges remains the skewing of this normative trajectory and acknowledging what Daniel Bensaïd calls “la discordance des temps” (1995). The recognition of the empirically lived complexity of multiple and conflictual temporalities interrupts the normative casting of what “old” and “new” means. As Harootunian puts it, “One of the more successful conjurations performed by modern industrialized societies has been to conceal the unevenness within their own precincts and its accompanying, mixed, and often unevenness within theirs in regulating the rhythms of life, making it appear as a problem stigmatizing the nonmodern”(474). This confusion of temporalities, a function of the coeval disjunctions of both everyday life and larger institutional histories, structures our understanding of the lateness or newness of both “Queer” and “Europe.” Within some institutional spaces within the United States itself, Queer is still new, while many within Europe might, and do, receive some of the

Introduction

15

conclusions of queer theory as familiar, though not necessarily under that name. Conservative and liberal commentators, such as Niall Ferguson in his Civilization: The West and the Rest, cast Europe precisely as “new” not with reference to the EU, but by comparison with the non-West, or the “resterners,” as he calls them in the division he constructs between the West and the Rest (Ferguson 2011). From the lived temporalities of everyday life, to institutional histories and geopolitics and “the stigmatization of the nonmodern,” the temporal continuum that underpins the oldness of Queer and Europe is undermined by the more historical of the essays in the collection. By revealing what was “new” in the past (see Gary Ferguson’s essay on homosexual marriage in renaissance Italy), or by focusing on what was in the past but not known to us until recently (see Grisard’s essay on the complex erotics of political revolt around 1920s Russian anarchist women), the historical framing of such phenomena skews a linear narrativization of what queer and Europe could mean. This historical puncturing of the temporality of linear historicism requires a rethinking of geography, too. The establishment of spatial coordinates necessary for stabilizing normative conceptions of Europe needs critical scrutiny. Queering Europe necessitates no privileged location from which the history of its stabilization needs to be analyzed. The convincing, and now rightfully acknowledged postcolonial critique of Europe’s claims to superiority are being supplemented by more recent voices from within Europe itself. These discourses question the unifying spatial construction of Europe by mapping other cartographies of political and cultural value over the hegemonic imaginary of Europe as a unit, inspired often by the crucial work of Antonio Gramsci’s “On the Southern Question.” What Harootunian calls “the stigmatizing of the nonmodern” has a history and a geography that does not map easily onto the discourse of a selfcontained European identity, however expansive its contours are becoming today. The discursive construction of the “nonmodern” produces Others within and beyond Europe. Roberto Dainotto situates “the atavism of the south,” in particular the regions around the southern borders of Europe, as a “nightmare within Europe’s own borders” (2007, 55). Inspired partly by Edward Said’s Beginnings, Dainotto tracks the origins of “Europe in theory” as a complex process of internal and external distinctions that do not map onto the present conception of Europe’s borders (Ferguson 2010). The consequences of that historical mapping of geography are echoed in the contradictions multiplying around the place of the Mediterranean as a border of Europe. Nicolas Sarkozy’s ambitions for uniting the countries around the Mediterranean rim, including North Africa, are now being fol-

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lowed by the French and Italian governments scrambling to keep out precisely those North Africans Sarkozy claimed Europeans share much with. And the consequences of this “influx” from beyond the borders of the EU are reverberating within the EU, with a critical reappraisal of the Schengen agreement on free movement of peoples within its borders. The reverberations of history in the echo chamber of geography skew both linear temporality and traditional cartography. The focus of some essays on politics (historical and contemporary) within Europe can be seen as queering precisely in this sense of skewing the time-space stabilization of Europe as an imagined community. Speaking from multiple locations within Europe, and from multiple historical moments, the essays share the postcolonial critiques of European hegemony, while at the same time by virtue of their geographical and historical perspectives, acquire a definite specificity. Others link the historical construction of nationalism with colonialism, factoring in more directly the colonial experience into the equation of Europe with civilization and (hetero)normativity. Queer is also vulnerable to a rhetoric of splitting that always constitutes a powerful form of attack. Like Europe, queer is as old and as new as any conceptual paradigm. If a theoretician seeks to discover practices and concepts dating from a historical moment when the term had not yet gained currency as a mobilizing label in Western academic and popular culture, his or her archaeology of queer will not systematically be anachronistic. In that case, preserving a dialectical tension between old and new means acknowledging that there is no natural correlation between the contemporary status of queer theory and the contemporariness of its objects of study. The Middle Ages are as queer or as queerly queer as the new millennium, as long as we accept that the opposition between old and new could also be the effect of a form of historical thinking that queer contests. In the introduction of Queering the Middle Ages, Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger ask whether . . . the apparently stable essences of historical thinking (primitivity, modernity, the medieval) need to be reconceived not as static entities but as stabilized effects of retrospection? In other words, might we need (preposterously) to rethink what we have come to know as the Middle Ages not as preceding modernity but as the effect of a certain self-construction of the modern, which gives itself identity by delimiting a “before” that is everything the modern is not? [. . .] Queer theory’s “preposterous” historicism, while sharing a politics with other antihomophobic, antiheteronormative projects, provides a different theoretical perspective from which to take up and disturb the question

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of history and anachronism in the study of the premodern. (Burger and Kruger 2001, xiii)

The most contemporary queer discourses and objects are more likely to be “old” in some academic contexts if they become rhetorically predictable. In Europe, however, they may also appear too new because they will not even be intelligible and recognizable. In some European universities, queer may not even be a “new” label. It is yet to emerge, or it is slowly appearing. When this happens, however, both Queer and Europe change each other. There is something new about a Europe that reads, adapts, and translates North American queer theorists and does not cordon off queer theory as an exclusively non-European field of expertise.10 There is something European and queer about books that focus on the Europeanization of queer histories and interrogate post-communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe (Kulpa 2011). There is something queer about questioning the use of the word queer in a Spanish context (Fouz-Hernández 2004). There is something new about those collaborative and international Queer discourses that reveal and analyze specifically European queer objects or deploy their problematic in a European (post)national context (see Lucille Cairn’s essay in this volume, Provencher 2010, Minning 2010). They do not have to be subsumed under a broad and ahistorical Queerness that has sometimes failed to recognize its own North American biases. When new European queers refuse to indulge in anti-Americanism just as they avoid idealizing the States as the origin of all Queer, they may be described as an emergent movement. Yet the fact that both Europe and Queer change in each other’s presence does not guarantee that the rearrangement of both paradigms is always politically desirable. Harootunian explicitly links the question of temporality and emergence to politics: the articulation of these ambiguous mixtures of modern and archaic, new and old, here and there, contemporary and nativist has always been present to remind us of the perseverance of a temporal refraction distinguished by noncontemporaneous contemporaneity. It is in this sense that the Southern Question has become a lasting historical trope or the coexistence of different temporal regimes and their referents. The progress vouched for by a conception of modernity (and even belatedly capitalist ideology in its offer to raise all societies to the same level) would, it was believed, overcome uneven rhythms and fill in the distance created by lag and delay. The guarantee of the future required the effacement from memory of the miseries and difference engendered in the present. But when theorization of modernity fastened onto progress

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and rationality, as was eventually played out in a discourse on modernization during the cold war, the outline of unevenness was blurred by scientific and technological criteria. (Harootunian 475–76)

Ponzanesi’s essay on Italy and the sexual politics within colonialism, for example, skews the place of the “South” within the cultural imaginary of Europe by intensifying the temporal refraction produced by the ambiguous place of the (homo)sexual within nationalist and colonial discourse. The relationship between the politics of time (old and new) and cultural imaginaries requires some elaboration in this context. Framing the cultural aspects of this queering of Europe is necessary because the cultural (and the personal sometimes) can be a risky resource to appeal to in destabilizing normative discourses, whether Eurocentric, racist, xenophobic, or patriarchal. The risk lies in the fact that the “cultural” might get sequestered as somehow oppositional to the normative discourses mentioned previously, while a more politically and intellectually efficacious argument would be to see the cultural and what is termed “the political” (the state for example) as dialectically related. A dialectical understanding of the cultural and political discourse around Europe would acknowledge that neither the cultural nor political are opposites, and nor do they possess some ontologically defined political valence (progressive or regressive). The dialectical relationship resides in the fact that the analytically distinct spheres of the cultural and then (institutions of ) the political do materially rely on and mutually influence each other, and the forms of influence vary from mutual support to outright contradiction. Culturally inflected essays in this volume do not operate on the presumption that they are necessarily oppositional to the political, or that they are revealing of dimensions ignored by state-focused political analyses, but on the assumption that the language of culture is part of a force field of material and discursive resources that are also deployed by the political. The more cultural of the essays in the book do not derive their effectiveness in queering Europe because they are cultural, but because they are inseparable from the political. Recourse to cultural arguments are not escape strategies from the sphere of politics, the state, and institutionally sedimented power, but linked in unpredictable ways to them. Timothy Bewes makes this point in “Europe and Utopia: How Cultural History Deals with the Paradox of Modernity.” In this nuanced reading of Luisa Passerini’s Europe in Love, Love in Europe (Passerini 1999), he argues that the book can be seen as a “queering” of Europe through her virtuoso reading of the writings and speeches of artists, poets, and public

Introduction

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figures in the inter-war period in Britain. By focusing on “love,” and on acts of imaginative construction, she posits the sphere of the cultural, with its attendant language of love, family, desire, and feelings, as a counter to the stratified, patriarchal, and overly bureaucratic discourse of Europe emanating from the EU. If the cultural, in Passerini’s account, could be said to queer the political stabilization of an exclusionary and hegemonic idea of Europe, Bewes is quick to warn that opposing the cultural to the political runs the risk of being precisely blind to history. For, in contemporary politics around Europe, the vaguely cultural and its related discourse of feelings and emotions, are precisely the form through which the most exclusionary, xenophobic, and capitalist discourses of and in Europe take place. The realm of subjective feelings (the “cultural”) is the mode of doing politics, as Emma Wilson demonstrates in her exploration of queer pathos in this volume. Bewes reminds us through Adorno that the realm of culture is itself reified, and that cultural criticism cannot assume that culture is a tool against reified society. Culture has become ideological not only as the quintessence of subjectively devised manifestations of the objective mind, but even more as the sphere of private life. The illusory importance and autonomy of private life conceals the fact that private life drags on only as an appendage of the social process (Adorno 1981, 30). Bewes argues that “the very concept of the cultural as opposed to— or distinct from —the political holds out the ideological promise of a sphere free from the operation of ideology” (115). The expansion of Europe’s eastern borders are a striking example where the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of globalization are discernible. Culture is both a commodity for export and a resource for resistance. Anikó Imre’s analyses of the dialectic of globalizing capitalist expansion and popular forms of (sub)national resistance in the context of “the transformation of media cultures in the New Europe” (2009) tracks the dialectical character of this ambivalence. Mass-mediatized cultural productions, the proliferation of identities, and the expansion of Europe situate the cultural and the political in constantly changing relationships, producing and diversifying imaginations of trans- and sub-European belonging (see Stychin in this volume). While Adorno is surely right that culture is ideological, and private life cannot claim an autonomy from technocratic rationalization, the continuing emergence of other forms of cultural belonging both within and across the borders of Europe (always situated within the economic and political dynamic of European expansion) do harbor the potential for alternative imaginings of what culture might be. Such alternative imaginings, if we

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keep in mind the earlier point that “queering” is a process that continually calls into question identity-stabilization, are not guarantors of enduring resistance or oppositionality. But precisely for that reason, neither can they be subsumed within a happy pluralism. Rather, the more “cultural” essays are interruptions rather than additions, demanding shifts in perspectives and incisive critiques of all claims to stable identity-formation as a nonconflictual process, whether queer or European. The essays by Laure Murat, Paul Bowman, and Carl Stychin in this volume explore the ambivalent political valences of (popular) culture by thinking Queer and Europe together. This nuanced framing of the cultural focus of some of the essays on queering Europe thus aims to engage in a dialectical thinking of the cultural and the political that does not suggest that the cultural is a domain separable from, and opposed to, the political. The critiques, which engage love, family, sexuality, and feelings are resources that can be used in politics itself. The cultural take on them acknowledges the dialectical relationship between the cultural and the political and exploits this link in counter-hegemonic and nonexclusionary ways. When considered together, Queer and Europe defamiliarize each other, take each other out of our disciplinary or object-based comfort zones. In this book, Queer is not confined to sexual and gender politics; Europe is not reduced to what happens within its more or less imaginary geographical borders. When Queer and Europe encounter each other, they are not safely anchored in their own basis of normativity and they influence each other in unpredictable ways. In other words, here, Queer is not a purely North American or even Anglo Saxon reference, nor is it our intention to claim the existence of a purely distinct European Queer Theory. The double and chiasmatic back and forth movement that occurs in each of the following essays operates a simultaneous Queering of Europe and a Europeanizing of Queer. One of the aspects that we find most precious about queer thinking is not its focus on sexual politics but its continual resistance to its own foundational models. The origin of Queer is what makes it impossible to idealize and fossilize the origin. Similarly, one of the most productive ways to think about Europe is to note the apparent paradox: Doubts about the very existence of a European identity may be the most remarkable characteristic of that identity. That Europe constantly interrogates its philosophical, political, or geographical borders does not erase Europe but makes it more difficult to appropriate it in the service of any given agenda. Focusing on what can be(come) queer about Europe and what can be(come) European

Introduction

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about queer will help us focus on the need to rethink marginality, recognizability, and intelligibility. In her Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities and Late Capitalism, Hennessy suggests: Like lesbian feminism and the gay liberation movement, the queer critique of heteronormativity is intensely and aggressively concerned with issues of visibility. Chants like “We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used to It” and actions like Queers Bash Back, Queer Nights Out, Queer KissIns, and Mall Zaps are aimed at making visible those identities that the ubiquitous heteronormative culture would erase. Politically, the aim of queer visibility actions is not to include queers in the cultural dominant but to continually pressure and disclose the heteronormative. (Hennessy 2000, 114)

Such remarks help us rethink the issue of marginality in a constantly enlarging Europe that must reevaluate its value and its identity whenever the issue of the newcomer has to be addressed. Those migrants who are already in Europe and not traditionally Europeans only expose the queer center that Europe sometimes pretends to believe in when it looks at those countries interested in joining the European Union. We are not suggesting that Europe, as a whole, is a queer continent because what is queer about Europe is precisely that it is not a whole.11 Neither are we trying to ascertain which parts of Europe are queer and which are not: The objective is not to analyze the specific role played by queer subjects in Europe, for example, because then, the visibility and recognizability of our objects would already have been over-determined by pre-existing definitions of queer instead of emerging as a result of the redefinition of such parameters. We assume that whoever acts in ways perceived or recognized as queer in Europe can only be discovered after we have thought about what Europe does to Queer and vice-versa. What kind of Queer does an encounter between Europe and Queer produce? Will there be a Queer European language to recognize and learn? Will there be a European Queer or a Queer European discourse or aesthetics? If we are to believe Etienne Balibar’s analysis, borders are no longer lines of demarcation between the old nation states (Balibar 1991). They appear, disappear, and reappear in the center of states and urban nodes. They are not clear lines of demarcation but, rather, they proliferate and morph, demanding the invention of new practices or borderwork (Rumford 2008). Queer theorists’ constant questioning of normativity implicitly raises the issue of how to act and react in the presence of changing borders.

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Conclusion: Defamiliarizing Encounter Queer and Europe are not necessarily going to re-enchant each other. The essays in this book do not fetishistically seek to recapture what was once magical about Europe and Queer. They do not propose to re-enchant an original moment that, any way, would be hard to identify with any historical certainty. Focusing on the European Union’s early stage would neglect the fact that its disturbing legacy cannot be reduced to twentieth-century armed conflicts. And expressing nostalgia for the first decade of the Queer movement would limit the scope of Queer to North America and would also create a most uncomfortable idealization of a times when AIDS was still lethal even for those who could subsequently benefit from Western medicine. We are not looking for a new spell but rather for the space of political and cultural production that opens up when we give up on the magic of spells. Re-enchantment is not the only way forward. Coming to terms with the productivity of disillusionment is not synonymous with repudiation and renunciation. The intersection between Europe and Queer can map a productive site of reflection about contestation and dissent. It can also help us confirm and perhaps celebrate each discourse or paradigm’s internal contradictions. Europeanized Queerness and Queer Europeanness are not fixed new discourses or identities but the recognition of a certain relationship to our own epistemological choices: No triumphant identification with the current state of Queer (or) Europe is possible. This impossibility is precisely the condition of possibility for thinking the political opportunities opened up by exploring the internal contradictions of both paradigms. The spurious stability implied by both paradigms, when internally dis-assembled and linked to historically annulled hopes and presently construed possibilities, furthers the opportunities opened up by productive dis-orientations. Jacqueline Rose’s eloquent exploration of the opportunities that “the crisis of our culture” afford remains especially salient today (Rose 1995, 3). She argues that encounters with difference, while possessing a problematic history of exclusion or subsumption, are also occasions for dis-orientation and self-critique, turning back on those doing the encountering and questioning the norms by which identity thwarts threats from and of otherness. The essays that follow read these two paradigms as sites of conflict, undermining the epistemology that stabilizes our visions of pastness, the present, and possible futures, and explore how altered perspectives help produce other visions of these paradigms in the present. If the essays “give up the myth of perfect understanding” that underpins a

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visual epistemology and processual conception of history and geography, they also suggest that a “way of reading is not to find, but to dis-orient, oneself ” (13). The essays here find and disorient both the self doing the finding and the paradigms. This dis-orientation is a re-orientation too. The critical impulses of queer theory derived often from such a dis-orientation, and the fractious journey of Europe, too, has a history and a future whose trajectories have and require (self )reflection. Sara Ahmed argues: If orientation is a matter of how we reside or how we clear space that is familiar, then orientations also take time. Orientations allow us to take up space insofar as they take time. Even when orientations seem to be about which way we are facing in the present, they also point us toward the future. The hope of changing directions is always that we do not know where some paths may take us: risking departure from the straight and narrow makes new futures possible, which might involve going astray, getting lost, or even becoming queer. (Ahmed 2006, 554)

By thinking temporality as discordance, the matrices of past, present, and future provide no secure ground on which paths can be traced. But acknowledging the risk of becoming queer by getting lost is also a gain. If Europe is a heading, the spatial trajectories and the time it takes for getting there and getting lost might be indistinguishable because they are too intertwined. Accepting the difficulties and potentialities of this ignorance of where one is going, Ginette Verstraete argues in Tracking Europe that “Europe defined as a distance in time and space is constituted through a literal and figural movement that displaces while temporarily putting to an end what it aims to install” (Verstraete 2010, 15). The essays trace multiple trajectories and produce conflictual temporalities; they re-orient the place of Europe and the time of becoming queer. By framing them in this way, we do not suggest that getting lost is the same as getting there but that distinguishing between the two takes place only after the fact, or in the time of the encounter between Queer and Europe.

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(Same-Sex) Marriage and the Making of Europe: Renaissance Rome Revisited Gary Ferguson

In the context of a collective project bringing into dialogue queer theory and Europe, what place might be accorded to a reflection grounded in the sixteenth century—a time when the first of the two terms in question did not exist as a conceptual category and the second had radically different meanings from today? Despite the degree of anachronism involved in approaching historical material through modern frames of analysis, I have proposed elsewhere that queer can be turned fruitfully toward the past in a number of ways.1 First, it can be beneficial to linger over, to “interrogate” moments in early or pre-modern texts that seem queer to the modern reader: representations of sexual ambiguity, for example, that might provoke perplexity, anxiety, or curiosity, and thus work to destabilize heteronormative understandings of the present. Pursuing a project of historical contextualization, we can ask further whether, and if so to what degree, such representations were likely to produce a similar reaction in the past, and seek to understand why or why not this might have been the case. Conversely, we can explore what was perceived as queer in the past— that is, “what ideas and behaviours were judged incongruous, exaggerated, excessive, or unreasonable; what ideas and behaviours were stigmatised, at27

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tracted disapprobation, censure, or retribution: in a word, what challenged or subverted past socio-sexual norms” (Ferguson, Queer: 51). Seeking not to normalize the past “but rather to discover how it might be different from the present precisely in the ways it configured norms and marginalities differently” can again serve to “denormalize” the present.2 This reciprocal interrogation of queer and the past can be extended to include Europe in a triangular dialogue in order to ask what might happen when queer is brought into play in a double focus with a Europe called modern or post-modern and one called early or pre-modern. My test case for such an inquiry here will be an issue that in Europe (as in North America and elsewhere) has become central to gay and lesbian politics, but an issue that involves a contested relationship to queer politics: same-sex marriage. My locale will be Renaissance Rome, my principal guide the famous French essayist Michel de Montaigne. In antiquity, Europe had existed as a (European) geographical concept, denoting, along with Africa and Asia, one of the three parts of the known world. In the Middle Ages, the same notion persisted, though it was overlaid with the geographically less determined but popularly more resonant concept of Christendom. If, by the end of the period, and especially for many of the Renaissance humanists who promoted an international Latin culture, Christendom and Europe came to be largely synonymous, with the latter enjoying greater currency, the sixteenth century also saw the advent of the Reformation, which signaled the breakup both of the Western Christian Church and of European Latinity.3 As the religious question set predominantly Catholic and Protestant countries against one another, it fostered the definition of national differences. The same process received a strong impetus from the development of what Benedict Anderson has called “print-languages,” operating “below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars,” that brought together large numbers of readers, connected through books, who “formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community” (Anderson 44). Europe had always defined itself in opposition to non-European others, notably the Asian East. In the sixteenth century, this process too became considerably more pressing and complex with the discovery of a previously unknown continent, the “New World” of the Americas. The beginning of European colonial expansion to the West coincided, moreover, with military attacks from the East and incursions into Europe by the Ottoman Turks, established in Constantinople/Istanbul since 1453. The Fall of Byzantium had initially produced a wave of Christian emigration to Europe by scholars, artists, and artisans whose impact on the burgeoning cultural

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and intellectual ferment of the Renaissance cannot be underestimated. Rapidly, the Turks came to dominate the Eastern Mediterranean. In the early and middle decades of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Emperor Suleiman I the Magnificent invaded and conquered large tracts of European territory, including much of the Kingdom of Hungary, twice, in 1529 and 1532, threatening Vienna. In 1534, the famous naval commander Barbarossa took the city of Tunis and the surrounding lands; if the North African port was recaptured by the Holy Roman Emperor the following year, it passed definitively to the Turks, after a period of struggle between the two empires, in 1574. The political situation in the East was thus an additional factor serving to exacerbate tension and contributing simultaneously to the consolidation of the idea of Europe and to the development of the continent’s constituent nations: Spain, France, England . . . The general dominance of Spain, both in the Americas and, since the election of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, in the “Old World,” put such pressure on other European countries that Francis I, the “Most Christian” King of France, sought to counter the vast power of the “Catholic” King of Spain by entering into a series of alliances with the “infidel” Turks.4 Reading about the “New World” in books and finding himself surrounded by civil wars between Catholics and Protestants, Montaigne used his essay “Of Cannibals” to reflect on the barbarity and intolerance practiced in the name of religion in a France in which neighbors had been transformed into enemies. A little later, in “Of Coaches,” Montaigne’s indignation would be directed toward the Spanish in condemnation of the violence and pillaging of the Americas perpetrated by the conquistadors. In a compelling reading of this essay, Timothy Hampton has shown how, through strategically placed figures of travel—like the conquistador, Montaigne is a handy horseman; unlike the Spanish adventurer, he cannot bear the motion of a boat—the essayist both identifies with and distances himself from the group of colonial oppressors. It is writing of but not in the Americas, of Spaniards but not as Spanish, that Montaigne defines himself simultaneously as European and French (Hampton 210 –24). Such a position, as Hampton argues, could emerge only from the relative lack of success of French imperial projects in the “New World”—a failure associated in its turn with the internal religious dissentions that divided Frenchmen against one another and hampered foreign expeditions and the implantation of culturally unified colonies abroad (Lestringant). French cultural disunity and internal European national rivalries, in other words, allow Montaigne’s complex and shifting imaginary identification with the “New World” inhabitants, as in a famous passage, analyzed tellingly by Hamp-

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ton, the essayist speaks in turn of “the men [Spanish] who subjugated them [the native Americans],” “those nations” astonished to see arrive “bearded men . . . from a part of the world so remote [Spain /Europe] . . . mounted on great unknown monsters [horses], . . . equipped with a hard and shiny skin [armor],” and the “thunder of our cannon and harquebuses.”5 In the twenty-first century, relations with now former colonies remain central to European politics—whether between the EU and the United States as a political and economic ally/competitor, or between Spain and Latin America, France and its DOM-TOM (départements et territoires d’outre-mer) and the nations comprising la francophonie, or the UK and the Commonwealth. No doubt because with Asia it shares a single landmass, Europe’s eastern borders also remain highly sensitive, as seen in its relations with Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union, but presently most strikingly with Turkey, whose application to “join Europe” has become a particularly fraught process in which the country’s geographical location and predominantly/Islamic religious adherence have both been alleged as disqualifying factors. Another major condition of becoming a member of the European Community, along with a commitment to liberal capitalist economic policies—to a “Common Market”—is the respect for human rights. In countries applying capital punishment, this includes the abolition of the death penalty, a condition that Turkey fulfilled definitively in January 2004. Another aspect of the respect for human rights lies in the decriminalization of same-sex sexual acts. In the context of the Arab world, Joseph Massad has criticized the Occidentalizing premises that may undergird gay and lesbian international activism. Within countries of the “Old” Christian Europe that aspire to a place within the “New” European Community, similar tensions can surface, as Carl Stychin has shown in relation to laws criminalizing homosexual sexual acts in Romania. In such cases, negotiations between the different parties often take the form of a struggle between a discourse of global human rights and local claims to “traditional ways of life.” As Stychin also notes, the irony is that many countries of the European Union have very questionable histories in this respect; the human rights “Europe” requires have sometimes been in place in member states for no more than a few decades and may concern issues where, even in the present, consensus is far from having been achieved. In relation to same-sex couples, some countries allow marriage or civil unions, others do not; some allow same-sex couples to adopt or have joint legal guardianship of children, others do not. In such a context, in what ways might a histori-

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cal perspective contribute to a reflection on the question of same-sex marriage rights in Europe? Between June 1580 and November 1581, after publishing “Of Cannibals” but before writing “Of Coaches,” Montaigne made a trip through Switzerland and Germany to Italy. His principal destination was Rome, a city that, as the center of Catholic Christianity and the capital of the ancient Roman Empire, was a privileged destination for a Renaissance scholar. At the same time, Rome evoked a conflicted response on the part of many visiting humanists because it offered the spectacle of ancient architectural ruins, the symbol of a civilization definitively lost, and of a modern papal city easily perceived as corrupt and decadent.6 The Travel Journal that Montaigne kept during his voyage reflects on such topics. Yet what seems to interest the writer the most, strongly influenced as he is by his reading of ancient Skeptics such as Sextus Empiricus, is the diversity of places, peoples, and customs that he encounters. In Germany, for example, Montaigne is impressed by the general atmosphere of religious tolerance that prevails, in contrast with France, noting with admiration the frequency of marriages between Catholics and Protestants (Works 899 and elsewhere; Œuvres 1156, cf. 1148–51). In each place he visits, Montaigne is eager to see the local sights and to hear stories of interest— of historical events, current happenings, unusual customs, and so on. His enthusiasm for curiosities of all kinds is such that he complains if locals fail to show him some site of interest (886, 1139). Among the memorable stories Montaigne hears, one, in Vitry-le-François in eastern France, concerns a woman who had recently been hanged for having dressed and lived as a man, including taking another woman as his/her wife (869–70, 1118).7 Later, in Rome, he is told a story concerning same-sex marriages between men: On the 18th [March] the ambassador of Portugal made obeisance to the Pope for the kingdom of Portugal on behalf of King Philip—the same ambassador who was here to represent the deceased king and the Cortes opposed to King Philip. On my return from Saint Peter’s I met a man who informed me humorously of two things: that the Portuguese made their obeisance in Passion week; and then, that on this same day the station was at San Giovanni Porta Latina, in which church a few years before certain Portuguese had entered into a strange brotherhood. They married one another, male to male, at Mass, with the same ceremonies with which we perform our marriages [took communion together, read the same marriage gospel, and then went to bed and slept with each other]. The

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Roman wits said that because in the other conjunction, of male and female, this circumstance of marriage alone makes it legitimate, it had seemed to these sharp folk that this other action would become equally legitimate if they authorized it with ceremonies and mysteries of the Church. Eight or nine Portuguese of this fine sect were burned. I saw the Spanish ceremony. They fired a salvo of cannon from the Castle of Sant’Angelo [and the palace, and the ambassador was conducted] by the Pope’s trumpeters and drummers and archers. I did not go in to watch the harangue and the ceremony. The ambassador from the tsar of Muscovy, who was at a decorated window to see this ceremony, said that he had been invited to see a great assemblage, but that in his country, when they speak of troops of horse, it is always twentyfive or thirty thousand; and he laughed at all this ado, from what I was told by the very man who was commissioned to talk to him through an interpreter. (954 –55, modified)8

The principal events recounted in this passage appear to be accurate since they are confirmed, though with discrepancies in detail, by other sources. Concerning the same-sex marriages, we have, notably, a dispatch dated August 2, 1578 (that is, contemporary with the events themselves) from the Venetian ambassador to the Papal States, Antonio Tiepolo. Here, we read of men from Portugal and Spain, of whom eleven were arrested from among at least twenty-seven who were involved on more than one occasion. Tiepolo is less specific than Montaigne regarding the location where the ceremonies took place and their exact nature (he does not specify that they replicated exactly the usual wedding ceremony). The ambassador’s attitude to the subject is also very different from that of Montaigne, reflecting an unqualified condemnation of the men’s “wickedness.”9 The first reaction provoked by Montaigne’s account in the modern reader may well be one of surprise at such evident but unexpected testimony to a “queer” past— evidence that homosexual marriage is not a solely modern concern and that people drawn to others of their own sex laid claim to it in former ages— even in Christian Rome at the height of the Catholic Reformation. Montaigne’s story can thus be read as offering historical support for those working today for gay marriage and other rights (not least in Italy); it might also serve as a powerful example of “gay” resistance in the face of official persecution in a Europe not yet defined by civil rights, or where the law proscribed sexual acts that it now (for the most part and since relatively recently) protects. At the same time, Montaigne’s account might suggest that tolerance of homosexuality also has some historical precedent, evident in the absence of condemnation of the

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men’s actions, as Tiepolo’s outrage is replaced by a sense of amusement and irony on the part of the essayist, which seems to prolong that of the local Roman wits. The executed men appear, to be sure, as a curious and marginal group (“certain Portuguese,” “strange brotherhood,” “fine sect”), yet in Montaigne’s telling at least, they gain a viable presence, standing as a “they” over and against a “we.” Subsequently, moreover, heterosexual sex is referred to as “the other conjunction, of male and female,” a formulation that serves to adumbrate a point of view that might be associated with “them,” and from which “our marriages” are questioned and relativized. In its turn, however, sex between men becomes “this other action,” so that all sexual activity here is other, as—in a movement that recalls or anticipates the portrayal of conquistadors and native Americans in “Of Coaches”—the narrative identification shifts between “them” and “us.” Mobilizing Montaigne’s account in favor of the present-day “marriage equality” campaign is the most obvious and immediate political use to which it might be put. Paradoxically, however, such a use also entails a certain disregard both for history and for the textual complexity of the passage, focusing on and taking as self-evident and stable the meaning of the word marriage. What happens, however, if we look at this term more closely from a historical perspective? What happens if we pay attention to the narrative form of the story, as well as to the content relating to sixteenth-century European politics, into which the account of same-sex marriage is sandwiched? The story concerning same-sex marriage was recounted to the French visitor to the papal city by an unnamed interlocutor seeking to entertain. Montaigne had gone to the Vatican to watch, or at least at the same time as, a religious–diplomatic ceremony that generates three reported narratives; preceding directly the same-sex marriage story, the first is a mere detail intended to amuse. Montaigne notes that the Portuguese ambassador, acting on behalf of King Philip, is the same person who had previously represented the deceased king and the Estates opposed to Philip. What it is necessary to know in order to understand the irony of the situation is that the King Philip in question is Philip II of Spain, who, following the death of Portugal’s King Henry just the previous year, had sent troops into that country to press his claim to its throne. In 1581, then, the fidelity of the Portuguese nation to the papacy was offered in the name of the Spanish ruler to whom it was in the process of being subjected. Alluding to the country’s subjugated status, Montaigne’s informant makes his first witticism by pointing out that this ceremony of obeisance takes place in Passion Week, the beginning of the annual liturgical celebration of Christ’s

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suffering and death, a fitting time for an event that involved considerable humiliation for the ambassador and his countrymen. The event was also something of a humiliating exercise for Gregory XIII, however, since the pope had initially opposed Philip’s pursuit of the Portuguese throne— and consequent expansion of his domains—yet eventually been forced to accept the reality of the situation; the whole ceremony thus staged a representation of the power of the absent monarch (Dandelet 74 –5; Pastor 256 –60). In a further twist of irony, Philip’s annexation of Portugal had in large part been enabled by Gregory’s own refusal to release King Henry, who was in clerical orders and a cardinal, from his vow of celibacy, thus preventing him from marrying and potentially producing an heir. By ensuring the creation of the dynastic void that Philip exploited, the pope was in no small part responsible for the very political consequences he would have preferred to avoid.10 The fate of Portugal, it must be remembered, was only the most recent episode in the late-medieval and early modern process of constructing a unified Spain that would cover the whole of the Iberian peninsula, subsuming many older regional nations. Only with the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs, in 1469, had the kingdoms of Aragon (including Catalonia) and Castile come together, to which were added that of Granada in 1492, with the expulsion of the Moors, and, in 1515, the lands of the crown of Navarre south of the Pyrenees (occupied since 1512). Philip II’s father, Charles V (or Charles I), was the first king to rule over this consolidated Spain, technically as co-monarch with his mother Joanna the Mad. If Portugal would regain its autonomy in 1640 under King John IV, the status of other Iberian regions / former kingdoms / nations has become one of the most pressing political issues in the post-Franco Spain of our own day. Throughout the sixteenth century, the relationship between the papacy and the Spanish crown was one of cooperation and alliance, but also of rivalry, as each party constantly maneuvered to press its own advantage.11 Spain, moreover, was the most influential power in the Italian peninsula. Philip II was also King of Naples and Duke of Milan, two territories that surrounded the Papal States to the south and the north. The city of Rome itself, finally, was home to such a significant population of Spaniards that Thomas Dandelet refers to them as “colonizers for a form of . . . ‘soft,’ or informal, imperialism” (9). Portugal too, of course, was an active colonial power in rivalry with Spain in the “New World.” In 1580, however, the Portuguese colonizers were, in their turn, being “colonized.” The political context for the reception of the Portuguese ambassador by the pope

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in 1581, then, could hardly have been more highly charged, as the dominant colonial power of Spain was consolidating and extending its hegemony both beyond and within the borders of Europe, both beyond and within its “own” borders. Montaigne alludes to Portugal’s annexation at the beginning of his account of the “Spanish ceremony.” His third and concluding story concerns the ambassador of the Russian Tsar, Ivan IV the Terrible, who claims to find the proceedings distinctly unimpressive. Only a political actor on the edge of events, on the edge of Europe, as well as belonging to a different Christian Church, the Orthodox, might look on with such apparent detachment and amusement. The ambassador’s pose was not without feint, however. As Montaigne already knew, his mission was to persuade the pope to discourage the Polish king from attacking the tsar on the grounds that this weakened Russia’s ability to resist Turkish invasion. In this way, the Russian emissary also appealed to shared Christian and European interests (949, 1220 –21). As for the author himself, his presence as an observer might also not have been wholly disinterested. Philippe Desan has recently argued that Montaigne, at this point in his stay in Rome, was hoping to be named France’s ambassador to the Holy See. Such an outcome would not materialize; if this was indeed Montaigne’s ambition, however, he reveals himself here as a canny political observer, one able to obtain access to important diplomatic figures and in touch with knowing observers. How, then, does the story of same-sex marriage relate to this political context? It is introduced narratively through a series of corresponding and contrasting elements, involving time, place, and national origin: On the same day, according to the Catholic liturgical calendar (the Saturday in Passion Week, which is also the day before Palm Sunday), the station church was Saint John at the Latin Gate; in that place, three years earlier, other Portuguese men had performed other religious ceremonies by which they had married each other. What this means is that on the same day as the ceremony of Portugal’s obeisance to the Roman pontiff, worshippers would have assembled at Saint John at the Latin Gate for a procession and mass (originally in the presence of the pope himself ). In this way, the particular rites prescribed for the observance of Lent in Rome revolved around a place where, after only three years, the story of the Iberians associated with it was still very much alive in people’s memories, including, no doubt, that of Pope Gregory. On March 18, 1581, the liturgical calendar, with its annual cyclical celebrations, thus had the effect of recalling not only Christ’s passion and execution, but also the more recent passions and executions of “certain Portuguese men,” bringing both of these to-

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gether with the suffering of all the Portuguese, as an ambassador offered the submission of their nation to the pope in the name of a monarch to whom they were in the process of being forced to submit, and who would be recognized legally in the country itself only one month later.12 What is not explicit but seems to be implied in the narrative articulation of the two stories is a joke linking the political subjection of the Portuguese and their marrying each other, which depends on an imaginary equivalence between political submission and sexual submission. Such a vision resonates with a modern concept of sexuality to the extent that it establishes definitions based not on sexual practices, but on forms of desire and the objects to which desire is directed, overlooking the potentially differentiated sexual roles of male same-sex partners (conventionally “active” and “passive”). All of the men marrying are assimilated to a position of being submissive, passive (from the Latin patior, to suffer), like women—which seems to explain why in Montaigne’s (re)telling, the men need to be Portuguese when they were not. Tiepolo states that they were Portuguese and Spanish. In fact, while one of those condemned was of Albanian origin and one was Portuguese, six were Spanish. The historical reality, then, is that it was not men from a country about to be taken over who married each other, but men from the “virile” conquering nation. But given this historical datum, the political/sexual joke would no longer work. In this way, we can see how political considerations inflect the telling of a story about executed sodomites; equally, and conversely, a sexual economy influences a political one as a gendered vision of erotic desire is projected onto international relations. On what basis is it possible to correct Montaigne and largely corroborate Tiepolo on the question of the men’s national origins? Depositions in the form of wills made by the executed men were recorded by the Confraternity of San Giovanni Decollato (Saint John the Beheaded), a group of pious laymen that ministered to condemned criminals.13 The confraternity members strove to help prisoners to prepare for death, both spiritually and materially, by confessing their guilt, receiving the sacraments, bequeathing whatever property they owned, and arranging for their debts to be paid or begging for them to be forgiven. In this way, the confraternity sought to orchestrate and then tell the story of a criminal making a “good end”—an individual justly punished for his offense, but reintegrated into the community of Christians and indeed potentially saved in the afterlife. The only other possible narrative in the confraternity registers is that of the impenitent sinner who persists in his error, is put to death—in the most extreme cases burned alive—and consigned, with more or less cer-

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tainty, to the eternal fires of Hell.14 In the course of telling their “good” or their “bad” story, the entries reveal various details about their subjects, including, in this case, the description of a highly unusual and symbolically charged ritual of execution. After the prisoners were hanged in one of the accustomed places (near the bridge crossing the Tiber at the Castel Sant’Angelo), their corpses were taken by cart across the entire breadth of the city, from northwest to far southeast, to be burned at the Latin Gate, the site of their crime. We also learn that, in terms of their origins, one of the Spaniards came from Seville, two were Aragonese from the northeast of the country, and three were Castilians from Madrid and Toledo. The group was thus characterized by both commonalities and a diversity of regional attachments, which, while retaining significance in a foreign context, no doubt became secondary to a shared Iberian culture.15 What they also had in common was their social status since none of the men executed seems to have been wealthy, and although some were a little better off, others were clearly poor and the recipients of charity from the Spanish church of San Giacomo.16 While most of the men thus belonged to a foreign group with considerable influence, they occupied the lower rungs of society, some of them perhaps having come to Rome in the hope of improving their economic situation. A number of the confraternity entries also suggest the executed men’s genuine religious devotion. While the encounters between prisoners and their “comforters” certainly involved a degree of coercion, several of the entries nonetheless emphasize their subject’s piety, some of the men asking that small donations be made to charity and/or for masses to be said for the repose of their soul. In this light, it seems possible that their Christian faith might have contributed to the store they set by the religious ceremony for which they were arrested. This might also be suggested by the fact that such a ceremony, in the absence of recognition by civil or religious authorities, could have had only a limited, “personal” significance; in and of itself, it would not have conferred any legal rights of the kind marriageequality activists work to secure today. For most of the latter, the religious question is not of great significance, and they would argue that while religious groups might have the right to marry or to refuse to marry whomever they choose, the state has an obligation to marry all citizens who ask it to do so, without discriminating on the basis of sexuality. As Michael Warner has noted, marriage is a “package,” a whole series of rights that are bundled together and granted by the state under the umbrella of the single institution.17 Some gays and lesbians seek only access to these rights and are indifferent as to whether they are accorded through marriage or other

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forms of civil union; for others, true equality is seen to lie precisely in the right to accede to the same institution as male–female couples without any form of distinction. What exactly, then, might the men executed in Rome in 1578 have been doing and how might their case relate to or illuminate present-day debates? In order to pursue these questions, we will need to consider further the nature of marriage and other kinds of relationships in pre-modern Europe. Throughout the Middle Ages, people frequently married in informal ways, the only essential element being an exchange of vows between two consenting parties made in the present tense.18 Witnesses to the oath were desirable and useful in case of contestation; sexual consummation was also an important element, but not absolutely necessary; a visit to a church for a blessing at the door or for the couple to take communion might be seen as setting a spiritual seal on the union. The involvement of the Church or of a priest was not essential, however; neither did individuals’ families or secular authorities exercise complete control over those dependent on them. People who exchanged vows in the absence of witnesses and without the permission of their families and other appropriate authorities might well see their unions challenged or experience difficulties in having them recognized; there are many stories, however, that tell of individuals in precisely this situation.19 In the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Church and state both strove— eventually successfully—to subject marriage to much stricter conditions. Secular justice was interested in controlling property (dowries, inheritance rights, and so on), title (lineage), and the prerogatives of heads of families, overlords, and rulers. It sought to outlaw unauthorized unions that it labeled “clandestine.” The Church was interested in a number of moral questions: imposing monogamy, exogamy, and indissolubility, thus combating bigamy, alliance within too close a degree of consanguinity, and divorce, as well as fornication, adultery, and even sexual activity within marriage for purposes other than procreation. The Church was also a staunch defender, however, of the necessity of spouses’ consent, a requirement that frequently caused secular authorities to chafe. Without being in absolute agreement then, Church and state worked simultaneously to subject marriage to tighter controls. In this way, if the Council of Trent declined to make parental permission a prerequisite for a valid Catholic marriage, it did impose a number of other legal and ritual conditions, without which a union would henceforth be considered canonically null and void.20 From the point of view of Catholic theology, marriage was a sacrament; from a legal point of view, it was a contract, one of various kinds that

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could be made between individuals and to which it might therefore be compared. Notably, marriage shared important characteristics with the affrèrement, elective or adoptive brotherhood, that was common around the Mediterranean, in France, Italy, and Spain (Tulchin, Aubenas). Affrèrements sometimes involved several, or even many, men, related or not by blood, and if they were married, their wives and any children; they might also be contracted, however, by an unrelated couple, again generally men.21 Such arrangements were for life, but could be dissolved, either by mutual agreement or subject to the payment of a specified penalty by the party or parties to be released; they involved holding financial resources in common and frequently inhabiting a single dwelling. Because the affrèrement benefited many kinds of non-nuclear households that were common at the time, including same-sex pairings, it has been compared to the modernday French pacs (pacte civil de solidarité), a form of civil union open to people of the same and opposite sex, unrelated or related, offering many but not all of the benefits of marriage (Tulchin). The principal differences between the medieval and modern institutions, however, are that the pacs takes its place in a society in which same-sex sexual acts are no longer criminalized (unless involving a minor) and in which women have the same statutory rights as men. Like marriage, but contrary to the affrèrement, moreover, the pacs privileges the couple, since it can be contracted by no more than two people. A third medieval relationship—historically related to the affrèrement and also sharing characteristics with the pacs (but again in a society that criminalized sodomy)—was sworn or wedded brotherhood or friendship. John Boswell memorably described Eastern Orthodox rites of adelphopoiesis as forms of same-sex union that, in some cases, might well have involved a sexual relationship. There is also evidence of the existence of similar ceremonies in the West: An ordo ad fratres faciendum is attested in Dalmatia in the fourteenth century, for example. More generally, brotherhoods were being sworn solemnly in church in France in the fifteenth century; they became increasingly rare, however, and it is difficult to know how common they might have remained in any Catholic country in the sixteenth century, especially after the reforms of the Council of Trent (Bray, Friend: 13– 41, 126 –33, and elsewhere). In a preliminary discussion of the stories of same-sex marriage in Rome in 1578, I suggested— on the basis of Tiepolo’s more general account— that these might be best understood in the context of the tradition of sworn or wedded brotherhood/friendship, and that the ceremonies might not have reproduced exactly—as Montaigne’s informant claims—a wed-

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ding between a man and a woman (Ferguson, Queer: 229–36). What must be stressed, however, is that if two men exchanged vows and then took communion together in a church, this in itself would fulfill the essential elements of a wedding, according to a traditional understanding at the time. It would seem to be for this reason that, despite the fact that such a union would not be recognized by ecclesiastical or secular institutions, both Montaigne and Tiepolo write of the Iberians as marrying. It is for the same reason that, throughout this essay, I take my lead from these contemporary commentators and do likewise. While the pleasantry of the Roman wits might be seen as offering contrary evidence of a general perception of the naivety of the men’s actions and the assumption that a same-sex wedding ceremony could not be other than criminal, this would not necessarily imply its essential impossibility so much as the fact that it would not be allowed to stand if discovered by the authorities. If Montaigne’s and Tiepolo’s accounts offer striking testimony that the idea of marriage between people of the same sex was “thinkable” for many sixteenth-century Europeans,22 the latter’s reference to “certain ceremonies” or “some ceremonies of theirs” that defile the name of matrimony also invites us to consider whether the gatherings described might not have involved some kind of ludic or derisive parody of a wedding ceremony, followed by sexual activities. Such practices might draw on, but would go well beyond, contemporary examples of referring—sometimes no doubt facetiously or ironically—to males involved in a continuing relationship as married.23 They might have something in common with ludic weddings performed at the same time in Italy, in both same-sex and opposite-sex contexts. We know, for example, of the existence in Naples, in the early 1590s, of a kind of Academy under the leadership of one Father Giuseppe Buono, known as the abate Volpino. In a spirit of carnivalesque pantomime, the group conducted a mock wedding between two Augustinian friars and two youths.24 We also have letters from the period that refer to the relationship between a courtesan and her client in terms of marriage, in one case even describing a feast during which two such individuals celebrated their “solemn nuptials” (nozze solenni) before retiring to bed. The event seems to have established publicly the arrangement and given the man rights over the woman for a certain period— or for a single night—according to the extent of his finances (Storey 259–64). These examples from Renaissance Italy find later historical echoes in other European countries and seem to prefigure play involving joking about marriage associated with members of male urban subcultural groups in taverns in Paris and London (“mollies”) in the eighteenth century.25 While Tiepolo does not indicate

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this explicitly, the actions of the Iberians in Rome might well have shared to some extent in this kind of motivation, so that we should perhaps not seek to distinguish absolutely between “straight” or serious intentions and meanings—that is, ceremonies designed and believed to effect the union of a couple—and parodic ones, and to understand the actions of the Spanish and Portuguese men at the Latin Gate solely in terms of the one or the other. Parody itself, indeed, can be of a serious, polemical character. In this way, while the weddings enacted by the Naples Academy were of a ludic nature, they were accompanied by the formulation of claims of the legitimacy of marriage between men. If the performance itself was not intended to enact a same-sex union, that is, it did convey a provocative criticism of the Church and the assertion that such marriages should be possible.26 Whatever their precise nature, if the ceremonies performed by the Spanish and Portuguese men in Rome followed the ritual form of a nuptial mass and the solemnization of matrimony, including the reading of the same gospel passage, this would have been taken, according to the prescriptions of the recently promulgated Tridentine missal (missa pro sponso et sponsa), from the Gospel of Saint Matthew: Some Pharisees came to [ Jesus], and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” (The Bible, New Revised Standard Version, Matt. 19: 3–6)

Reading this gospel passage at a marriage between two men would seem to have clear implications for how the relationship was understood; it hardly represents a text that many same-sex (and no doubt some opposite-sex) couples would be likely to select for a wedding today.27 It might appear, then, that two men who desired to marry in this way would have conceived of their relationship in terms quite different from a pederastic and universalizing paradigm, widely current in Europe at the time, according to which any older/superior male might find attractive and engage in sexual activity with a younger/subordinate one, provided the older played a penetrative role.28 As noted above, however, evidence suggests that age/rank–graded relationships between males, when these were maintained over a certain time, might be referred to in terms of “man” and “wife.” In relation to Spain in particular, Cristian Berco has stressed

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the symbolic importance of sexual penetration for ideals of masculinity and the predominance of rigid conceptions of gender roles; evidence from Portugal attests to a similar outlook (Mott and Assunção). All of this points clearly to the fact that, while for many (though not all) Europeans today, marriage is conceived of as a relationship of equality, historically as an institution it functioned as a particularly powerful marker of and vehicle for the more general subordination of both women and younger males to adult men. If the men who met at the Latin Gate defined marriages between them in terms of “man” and “wife,” it seems likely that one of the spouses would have played a sexually passive role, perhaps identifying to some extent in female terms and/or displaying some degree of “effeminacy.” While not necessarily questioning established gender roles, this would nonetheless not be without consequence in a society in which male passivity beyond adolescence was strongly reviled. A long literary and cultural tradition, inherited from antiquity, poured scorn on the adult male perceived as effeminate. Also open to ridicule, however, was the man who did not limit his sexual activity with males to the still-beardless ephebe (Ferguson, Queer: 93–145). If, initially, one partner were a youth, significantly younger than the other, this might have represented an attempt to give a different, somewhat queerer, status to a usually more or less transitory relational form at once outlawed and embedded in contemporary social structures, which, through its indefinite continuation, would have become increasingly transgressive. If a same-sex relationship between men was not characterized by a disparity in age and/or status, and if it were influenced by other relational paradigms such as affrèrement or sworn or wedded brotherhood/ friendship—models implying a greater degree of conceptual equality and in which neither party was a “boy” or seen as being (equivalent to) a “woman”—then this would have represented an even greater departure from Renaissance socio-sexual norms. The more a sexual–affective relationship between men might have resembled one that in an early twentyfirst-century context might be considered the most common (normative) in Europe and North America, that is, the more unusual it would seem in sixteenth-century terms. Should we then conclude that an enduring marriage relationship between men would have been more queer in early modern Europe than it is now? As we have seen, medieval and early modern people enjoyed considerable opportunities for making a variety of relationships, including between those of the same sex, entailing legal rights that in many, if not most, European countries they are no longer / still not granted today. Sodomy,

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of course, constituted a crime that might be severely punished, but that remained frequently undetected or was tolerated to one degree or another. Subject to this restriction, the range of legally recognized relationships in pre-modern Europe included possibilities advocated by some modern queer activists in connection with marriage, notably the ability to formalize agreements irrespective not only of the sex of the partners involved but also of their number (Warner 88–90). These possibilities were gradually suppressed, however—for hetero as well as homo individuals—within the context of the process of the consolidation of the modern bureaucratic nation-state, as it and the Church centralized and put in place closer regulation of people’s “civil status,” limiting relational contracts to authorized marriage. The question of the queerness of same-sex marriage in Renaissance Rome must also be considered in the light of this evolution, since it might reflect, even partake in, a narrowing of relational possibilities. On the other hand, it might also have worked to resist these changes by affirming the traditional principle of individual independent agency and/or by combining elements of other traditional forms of relationship that would have had the effect of expanding the parameters of marriage and inflecting it in new ways. Any subversive potential of the men’s actions, however, would have been severely limited in a context in which a same-sex union would be deemed sacrilegious and need to be kept secret in order to avoid punishment. We do not know which, if any, of the Spanish and Portuguese men who met at the Latin Gate actually took part in a wedding ceremony organized by the group. We can, however, deduce certain details from the San Giovanni registers and from three extracts of the records of their trial, conducted by the court of the Governatore, recently brought to light by Giuseppe Marcocci.29 First of all, according to statements the men made to the judge, some of them were joined by ties of well-established friendship or even family connections; a number of them also had intertwined sexual histories and confessed to having had multiple relations with other members of the group at various times. While youths figured among those arrested, so too did mature men, some of the latter being involved in a continuing sexual–affective relationship. At times, the sexual activities described reflect a strict division between active and passive roles, with the passive partner referred to as a “woman” or “wife”; we also encounter, however, two adult men being alternatively active and passive with each other. This is the case with a certain Bernard(in)o de Alfar di Siviglia and one of the main figures of the group, Alfonso de Robles, who also appears to have had an involvement, going back many years, including periods of

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separation, with the Albanian Battista. Whether Robles was engaged in any relationship with a man that he perceived in terms of marriage, we do not know; he was, however, married to a woman living in Flanders and asked the Confraternity to send her a letter.30 Marriage between two men is referred to a number of times in the court depositions, although the precise meaning and value of some of these statements are open to question.31 The clearest declarations, however, concern a celebration that was to have taken place at Saint John at the Latin Gate on July 20, the day of the men’s arrest. One of the intended spouses was a certain Brother Giuseppe, whose status as a religious also raises questions concerning the projected ceremony’s significance, since a cleric was legally prevented from contracting marriage as a result of his vow of celibacy. In the event and perhaps somewhat suspiciously, Brother Giuseppe never appeared and was reported to have fallen ill and gone to hospital. Despite the failure of the nuptial ceremony to take place, the assembled company ate and spent the day together, only to be surprised, later in the afternoon, by the arrival of the forces of the law. The other intended spouse, who was among those arrested, was well known within the group as being sexually passive and, in the words of one of his friends, “served as a woman.”32 In this particular instance, then, the couple that was to have married conformed clearly to a fixed pattern of sexual roles, understood in conventionally gendered terms. At the same time, since the passive partner appears to have been an adult, his actions transgressed established gender boundaries. In comparison to sixteenth-century social norms, then, the men who met at the Latin Gate represent a spectrum of both conventional and nonconventional attitudes and behaviors. The group they formed appears to have constituted a context within which some of them had developed their own personal and sexual ethics, a context in which some of them laid claim to the ability to marry, but also to fit this to their own circumstances, to give marriage their own meaning(s). There are many differences between the situation of the Spanish and Portuguese in Rome and the terms that define modern practices of samesex marriage or, where this is not recognized, the debates around it and the “private” ceremonies to which couples sometimes have recourse. Queer critics of same-sex marriage often accuse it of representing an assimilationist impulse and are dismissive of personal commitment ceremonies that treat marriage as if it were a matter of two individuals’ mutual love, whereas it is a public state-sanctioned institution (Warner 98–101). In response to the latter accusation, it might be argued that such ceremonies generally reflect an absence of legal alternatives that they might nonetheless work

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proleptically to call into existence. Such differences notwithstanding, we might also discern an element of commonality between modern non-legal ceremonies and those of the Iberians in Renaissance Rome. The California law professor and lesbian activist Barbara J. Cox described her private commitment ceremony in the early 1990s as “an expression of the incredible love and respect that I have found with my partner” and a means of speaking of this openly “to those who participate in my world.”33 Marriage for the group of men at the Latin Gate in 1578 also concerned two individuals, in relation with a circle of friends—and perhaps with God. In Renaissance Europe, however, notions of privacy and individual conscience did not exist in their modern forms and actions involving both sexual practices and a religious–legal institution would not simply be ignored by Church–state authorities (as would generally be the case today in European and American states not recognizing same-sex marriage). Concomitantly, the intervention of those authorities was necessary in part precisely because marriage remained as yet less exclusively the province of the Church and the state than it is today, lying more, although to an ever diminishing degree, within the recognized competence of two individuals (in collaboration or contention with their families and social networks). Such a historical perspective might give those critical of “personal” ceremonies pause for thought. They might also consider what their position might have in common with that of the Roman wits in Montaigne’s anecdote. Seemingly not necessarily hostile to the executed men, they nevertheless feel superior to them, finding amusement in a line of reasoning they believed to be theirs or attributed to them, and that sought (naively) to legitimize criminalized/sinful sexual activity by recourse to ceremonies that themselves would be deemed criminal and sinful. The eight men involved, however, cannot have been ignorant of the fact that no religious or secular authority would recognize any marriage they performed; the significance of their actions lies not least in the fact that they proceeded undeterred, even in the face of the threat of death. They thus mark their disagreement with the official doxa. They have their own convictions; they act out of them and for themselves. An awareness of the history of marriage practices and their evolution as part of the emergence of the modern state might potentially deal a considerable blow to those who like to imagine—whose selective history would have it—that marriage has always been performed between one man and one woman and authorized by political and religious authorities, often acting in conjunction. At the same time, however, the men marrying in Rome in 1578 might not offer such evidently straightforward support to the modern-day campaign for same-sex marriage as might initially have

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been surmised; they are implicated in complex personal stories and broad and tangled social histories that would also allow them to be mobilized in favor of some of the more radical questioning of contemporary queer activists. The queer potential of these early modern Spaniards and Portuguese, however, lies not only in what we know about their actions; it derives also from the so partial and limited nature of their documentary survival. Despite the discovery of their wills and the fragments of court records, the men’s story retains many areas of shadow; their voices are cut off, and even when we hear them they are constrained by legal protocols, with their clearly delimited and codified interests and their particular investigative methods—including the use of torture.34 Thus, questions necessarily remain unanswered concerning the men’s ideas of themselves as gendered and sexual subjects, and their relation to later historical developments and to those of us living in the twenty-first century. Both the urgency and the challenge of such questioning were brought home to me in the summer of 2008, when I visited the church of Saint John at the Latin Gate with my partner. The ancient basilica is a predominantly Romanesque jewel, nestled in a part of Rome that is verdant and tranquil.35 The beauty of the edifice and its setting no doubt account for the fact that the church has become—to borrow an expression from a friend who is a priest—a wedding factory. Myriad notices contain instructions and information for engaged couples, including the hours of the week when marriages are celebrated (Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, 4 p.m.–7 p.m. and Saturday 10 a.m.–12:30 p.m. and 4 p.m.–7 p.m.!). The church itself was decorated in constant readiness for a wedding. And when I typed the name of the basilica into Google, the first link generated was a page dedicated to wedding information.36 In the early twenty-first century, Saint John at the Latin Gate stands as a symbol of a (Catholic) heteronormative Europe of “family values,” whose hegemony appears largely undisturbed by any of the queer questioning its own intimate history should require. The city of Rome also offered a contrasting and no less surprising moment, however, generated by the historical layerings that make up a dense urban fabric. Opposite the present Spanish national church of Santa Maria di Monserrato—a Catalan foundation, under reconstruction in 1578—stands a solid-looking building that was formerly the Corte Savella prison. It is here that the Iberians were held after their arrest. Only a short distance away along the same street, at 116 Via dei Banchi Vecchi, decked out in rainbow colors, is the gay and lesbian Libreria Babele, its name reveling so gleefully in a plurality of voices, a confounding coexistence of divergent tongues.

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The Spaniards and Portuguese who in some way laid claim to marriage in Renaissance Rome are diversely implicated in complex and crossed narratives of nation and empire, variously colonizing and colonized. As subjects of a history in part lost, they share something with the people on other continents whose extermination or long process of subjection and enslavement their contemporary countrymen were setting in train, those whose memory might attach only to registers of sale or buildings of imprisonment, common victims of a hegemonic national-imperialist project directed both outward and inward.37 In Michel Foucault’s striking formulation, they are infamous men, their existence momentarily illuminated in legal texts that serve to write them out of history, literally preparing them for and justifying their deaths. They are also illuminated, however, in the stories they generated, one of which was recorded in the journal of a curious French traveler, in the process of becoming a noted writer.38 Poignantly, the men’s rapid and highly controlled entry into and erasure from history were part of a single movement, a fact Gaspar de Martín de Vitoria perhaps understood when, cooperating only minimally with his “comforters,” he declined to make any material dispositions and affirmed that he wanted to leave “no memory.”39 He was, after all, the jilted “bride” whose wedding day had turned into a nightmare. “No memory” might also point historically to the happier fate of others who never entered history—who were not arrested, who escaped “justice,” who, literally, got away (with it), and so from us.40 It is, by the same token, the rapid and enforced passage into and out of the history of (a) Europe (of other— even reversed—rights and wrongs) that might allow those executed a place in a future past and thus perhaps a queerly haunting purchase in some present. Their histories that were—and were not—might also be histories in the making, histories that might yet still be . . .

A Case of Mistaken Identity: Female Russian Social Revolutionaries in Early-Twentieth-Century Switzerland Dominique Grisard

This essay is about a true story. A true story about faking it. Faking being a European. And faking being a man. A story about a fake man impersonating a European woman. This is a story about fictitious marriages and mistaken identities in early-twentieth-century Europe, about a female Russian terrorist who turned a posh Swiss alpine resort into a truly international murder scene. In a time when European nations were consolidating their constitutional democracies, much energy was devoted to symbolically fortifying Europe against the Russian empire. In this essay, I will interrogate the impact of revolutionary Russian women on European national identity formation. On the one hand, Russia and particularly Russian women were represented as the Other of Europe. On the other hand, Russian revolutionary women managed to “infiltrate” and disrupt the emerging national projects. My particular interest lies with the case of Tatiana Leontieva, a Russian medical student turned terrorist-assassin in Switzerland. As I argue, her undercover “high femme” performance troubled European identity politics in subtle and obvious ways: Her decidedly feminine self-presentation as well as her symbolic sex change in court and mass 48

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media dismantled dominant understandings of both gender and national identity. In this reading, Leontieva’s case effectively ruptured ongoing othering processes by defying the European stereotype of the Russian revolutionary woman. I contend that looking back at the interventions of Russian social revolutionaries in early-twentieth-century Western Europe, allows us to think historically about national and gender identity constructions, and about European border policing in a post–9/11 security era. Moreover, revisiting Russian women’s involvement in terrorist circles in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe, disrupts the dominant narrative about transnational terrorism, which situates 9/11 as its origin and the United States at its center. It reminds us that there are many other narratives of transnational terrorism that this discourse erases.

Murder in Interlaken The story is quickly told. On September 1, 1906, at the Hotel Jungfrau in the Swiss resort of Interlaken, lunch was served around noon like any other day. Only this time, one of the guests— dressed in an elegant white gown and a hat with a large feather—got up from her table, pulled a pistol out of her purse and fired seven bullets at the man lunching at the table next to hers. Chaos ensued in the dining room of the grand hotel; a number of women suffered nervous breakdowns, while others fled toward the exits.1 The murderess, seemingly undeterred by the commotion, walked out of the dining room and waited for the police. The pistol and The Tribune Russe, a caricature of the former Russian Minister of Interior on its cover, were all she had with her. It was soon verified that the young woman had mistaken Charles Müller, a well-to-do elderly Alsatian businessman for Pyotr Durnovo, a former Russian Minister of the Interior. It turned out the murderess had only ever seen a caricature of Durnovo in The Tribune Russe, which she had carried with her. Durnovo was known to vacation in Interlaken. He had, in fact, just returned to Russia from a vacation in the posh alpine resort. He had not used a pseudonym, however, and most definitely not the name Müller, as he emphasized to the Russian police who questioned him later (Collmer 334). Durnovo held different offices in the Tsar’s administration, most notably the post of Imperial Minister of the Interior from October 1905 to April 1906. The rapid succession of men who held that position during this time testifies to the instability of the Russian empire around the Revolution of 1905.2

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The murderess herself did not divulge her identity, which is why the police launched an international search and sent out over two thousand photographs of the young women in different dress. In the end, it was her father, a Russian general and vice-governor, who after seeing her picture in a Geneva newspaper identified the assassin as Tatiana Leontieva, born in 1883, two years after a group of social revolutionaries—among them Vera Figner and others who had studied at Swiss universities—assassinated Tsar Alexander II. When she was 15 years old, Leontieva was sent to boarding school in the French part of Switzerland. In 1903, she started medical school at the University of Lausanne where for the first time she met socialists (“Prozess Tatiana Leontieff ”). One year later, Leontieva and her mother returned to Saint Petersburg. Nicholas II, Alexander’s grandson, ruled over the Russian empire. Under his reign, Russia suffered defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, anti-Semitic propaganda led to a series of pogroms, and the workers march to the Winter Palace on January 22, 1905 made history as Bloody Sunday. As the story goes, it was witnessing the blood bath at the Winter Palace that made Leontieva join the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party. Soon thereafter she was arrested. Allegations of participating in the conspiracy against General Fyodor Trepov were filed against her, and she was incarcerated in the Peter and Paul Fortress. When she manifested signs of psychosis, the charges against her were dropped and she was transferred to a mental institution. After her release in December 1905, she and her mother returned to Switzerland and set up house in Lancy near Geneva. Newspapers first reported the murder on September 3, 1906, filling the reader in on the little that was known up to that point. They explained that the murderess had arrived at the Hotel Jungfrau with her “husband” a few days prior to the assassination (“Das Geheimnis”). The couple signed in as Mr. and Mrs. Stafford from Stockholm. During their stay, they visited a local seamstress where Mrs. Stafford had an elegant costume fitted (Wyss 13). It was the white dress in which she would be committing the murder. According to witnesses, the lady’s French was impeccable and her clothes stylish. She seemed at ease in the elegant environment of the hotel. Mr. Stafford, however, looked and behaved like a Russian working-class man (Wyss 13; Baynac 27). A few days before the shooting, Mr. Stafford disappeared, never to be seen again. At the trial in March 1907, Leontieva did not contest having committed the murder. “As terrorists,” she proclaimed in court, “we take the law in our hands to call criminals such as Durnovo, Pleve and Sergius to account” (“Prozess Tatiana Leontieff ”). The jury’s verdict: four years, a mild sen-

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tence for murder, even if one factored in the extenuating circumstances she was granted. In October 1908, before she could be released on parole, Leontieva was moved to the psychiatric clinic in Münsingen. Two years later, it was decided that Leontieva was to stay in the asylum —indeterminately. Leontieva died in 1922, having never set foot outside of the institution again. Certainly, hers is a fascinating story but what insights does it provide us about European identity formation? How does it contribute to a better understanding of how national identities may be effectively queered? On a more mundane level, who was mistaken for whom and why was Leontieva not penalized more severely for a murder she admitted? As I will demonstrate later in the essay, it is precisely the “mistaken” and “false” identities of Leontieva’s story that will play an important part in my queer reading of identity. But first, the circumstances surrounding the murder in Interlaken require further exploration.

Passing in European High Society There was much speculation about where the murderess hailed from in the first few days after the assassination. Most newspapers assumed the unidentified assassin was Russian. The French newspaper Le Matin de Paris, however, was convinced that the young woman was far too feminine and elegant to be anything but European.3 Swiss newspapers were also impressed by the woman’s style. Quite a few reporters described her as the light blond Finnish type—tall, slender, and very delicate.4 The fact that Leontieva’s “husband” initially accompanied her perfected the ploy. As a heterosexual couple, they were presumably subject to much less scrutiny, even if, as Baynac suggests, “[t]his was undoubtedly an unusual couple: he was in disguise but didn’t fool anyone; she made no attempt to disguise her clothing, only her role” (17). The author of The Story of Tatiana makes an interesting distinction here. To him, Leontieva’s attire reflected her “real self,” which is why it couldn’t be a disguise. He also seems to imply that her seemingly authentic self-presentation made her accomplice’s attempt at impersonating a European gentleman more convincing. In his view, playing her role subtly and expertly—a role that did not rely on changing her appearance significantly—gained her and her companion access to elite circles.5 In effect, Leontieva passed as a European married lady. The term “passing” is used critically to describe the discursive constellation of a person accessing the field of the “normal” due to missing or barely pronounced visual or habitual markers of marginalized

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identities. The underlying assumption of a person passing is “that there is a self that masquerades as another kind of self and does so successfully” (Halberstam, Female 21; also Engel 180). In this understanding, passing seems to rely on a sovereign subject’s will to pass and not on the accessibility of subject positions provided by a specific discourse. It also implies that there is a set of identifiable visual and habitual signifiers pertaining to any specific identity and that these signifiers are “natural” expressions of an “inner truth.” The fact that these visual signifiers serve to naturalize social categorizations as essential identities is rarely acknowledged, however. Without subscribing to the previously mentioned model of identity and the coherence of “inner and outer psychic space” (Butler 137), I would like to lay claim to the destabilizing potential of the act of passing. The destabilizing effect of Leontieva’s passing relied on the revelation of her persona after the murder. Clothing and disguise were important elements in executing the murder. This is best illustrated by the couple’s visit to the seamstress to have the dress chosen for the occasion fitted. In this light, Leontieva’s passing as an unassuming lady tourist may be read as a particular form of “drag.” Drag is generally “used to describe the theatricality of all gender identity” (Halberstam, Female 236; see also Halberstam, Queer 179–80). In this logic, drag performances are conscious, often ironic, attempts to make gender identities visible as constructions (Walker 7; also Butler 24). Contrary to this understanding of drag, Leontieva’s convincing act of upper class, straight femininity did not rely on exaggeration and irony. If anything, Leontieva’s was an act in erasing any trace of noticeable difference. In fact, her intervention points to the limits of conventional understandings of drag as visible gender transgressions. As Lisa Walker points out, drag’s “visual typification of identities often replicates the hierarchies on which identity categories are built,” i.e. privileging signifiers such as secondary sexual characteristics of the opposite sex “as visual evidence of subversion” (205). “That is to say, radical consciousness is ascribed to radical appearance” (206). In her case, it was not the visual nonconformity to class, gender, and sexual norms but the way she seemingly seamlessly conformed to them that let her and her partner gain access to the world of international tourism or, in Leontieva’s book, the criminals it harbored. In this light, Leontieva cannot be reduced to the “naturally” feminine, elite woman who accommodated or even secured her discomforted, awkward partner in crime. Instead she may have to be read as performing the understated “high femininity” expected of the European elite. The way she quite obviously knew how to keep a low profile, speaks to the fact that she was exploiting the subject position of the “high femme.” According to

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Duggan and McHugh, “femme” is about the deliberate performance of femininity (165).6 Along the lines of Butler’s understanding of drag, “high femme” then designates the potentially troubling enactment of European high-class heterosexual femininity (137; also Butler, Undoing 209). It is not the deliberation of the femme performance that makes Leontieva’s act so interesting, but the unintended effects this specific kind of performance had on European identity politics. In the words of Minnie Bruce Pratt: “A femme is not a woman, at least not the woman people think. It’s a case of mistaken identity” (52).7 In this essay, I want to therefore expand the term “drag” to include the non-ironic and less overt “performance of difference as a locus of political agency that has the potential to deconstruct foundational categories of identity” such as gender, sexual, class, and national identities (Walker 7). I would also like to reclaim the notion of passing as a potentially subversive act. Along with Walker, I argue that “the passer [sic], as a figure of indeterminacy, destabilizes identities predicated on the visible to reveal how they are constructed” (10). I am interested in the interventions of a figure like Leontieva precisely because they point to disruptions of nation, gender, and class as essential identity categories that do not rely on visibly deviating from traditional gender norms. Therefore, my aim is to de-center visual markers of identity for a moment to allow for other rupturing, troubling, and subversive strategies to come into view. I contend that even if Leontieva’s gender identity and her class position were not entirely at odds with the role she was playing, her gender presentation may still have had an unsettling effect on European notions of gender and national identity. As we shall see later within the European upper-class setting, Leontieva’s high femme performance destabilized signifiers of national identity, raising the question of how to distinguish the European from the Russian passing for European.

Pretending to Be Studying Most crimes committed by Russians in Switzerland were attributed to Russian university students (Gagliardi, “Organisatorisches” 627). Russians were responsible for explosions in Geneva, Lausanne, Zurich, and Basel; not all attacks had been perpetrated by students but the large number of Russians studying at Swiss universities led Swiss newspapers to conflate both. Besides, it allowed them to malign Russian students in the process. In 1867, the Russian Nadezhda Suslova was the first woman to earn a medical degree from a European university, which was granted to her

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by the University of Zurich. Word spread around. Russian study guides praised the Russian colony in Zurich (Neumann 113). Subsequently, young Russian women—all part of the Russian women’s movement—flocked to Zurich.8 It was almost like an “epidemic” of Russian women “running away from home,” eager to earn the necessary qualifications to serve as zemstvo doctors in rural areas of Russia.9 For several decades still, women were denied matriculation to universities in Russia and most countries in Europe (Meijer 24). This and the Russian revolutionary circles forming in cities such as Zurich, Bern, and Geneva made Switzerland an attractive place for liberated Russian women.10 In 1906, Russian women made up one-third of Switzerland’s entire university student body (Neumann 17). The Swiss claimed that Russians were swamping their universities and preventing their own students from studying (Gagliardi, “Die Russenfrage” 782). They also perceived the Russians as arrogant: Instead of making the most of their university education, an opportunity that the Swiss so generously granted them, they seemed to prefer plotting revolutionary upheavals (Gagliardi, “Organisatorisches” 635). This was what many Swiss maintained (Neumann 164; Feller 442). Many Russian women did become “politically oriented in the émigré atmosphere of Zurich, organizing socialist study groups and frequenting the lectures of Bakunin and Lavrov” (Whittaker 54; see also Meijer). According to the conservative press such as the protestant, rural, and anti-industrialist Berner Volkszeitung, Russian students were not only ridiculing the academy, they were also mocking Swiss hospitality.11 These newspapers noted with dismay that the faculty at Swiss universities, most of them Germans, welcomed Russian students only so that they could brag about how popular their lectures were.12 All told, Swiss universities were criticized for being a “breeding ground” for female revolutionaries.13 The murder in Interlaken added to the pressure on universities to solve what came to be called “The Russian Problem”: “inadequately educated elements” from the Russian empire overcrowding Swiss lecture halls (Gagliardi, “Organisatorisches” 627; Neumann 11). Even if it was rarely stated explicitly, Swiss universities were mainly preoccupied by the influence of Russian women. At a time when hardly any of their own women entered university, the numbers of female Russian students posed an entirely new problem to Swiss university officials. In 1903, for the first time, Swiss university presidents convened to address the high number of supposedly poorly qualified female students from Russia; the Universities of Zurich and Bern even put their competition aside to come up with a joint strat-

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egy.14 Until now, none of the Swiss universities had an admissions policy worth mentioning. Neither enrollment quota nor qualification criteria existed. The “Russian Problem,” i.e. the alleged inferior quality of women’s secondary education in particular, led the universities to jointly enforce an admissions policy.15 Neumann notes that these new restrictions were primarily meant to reduce the number of women in higher education (111).

Faking Being Men Russian women’s seemingly direct and abrasive ways led to much debate about their gender and sexual predilections. According to Swiss contemporaries such as history professor Ernst Gagliardi, Russian women not only pretended to be students but they also dared to “demonstratively copy men” (“Organisatorisches” 629; Neumann 98). Their performance of “masculinity without men” did not help them get along with male Swiss students, he opined.16 Russian women were described as “cool,” “grim,” and “stony-faced” (Gagliardi, “Organisatorisches” 636). They stood out for not taking care of their appearance, which was considered “unkempt,” “disagreeable,” and “unappealing” (Neumann 168). These short-haired “bluestockings” wore dark, simple clothing and blue glasses, and they smoked cigarettes incessantly (Gagliardi, “Organisatorisches,” 636). “The female Russian student, who is often criticized by West Europeans for her confident disdain for outer appearances, is also known for her spontaneous emotional outbreaks, which for third parties is not always agreeable,” the reputed newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung remarked in 1905.17 There was much talk about Russian women “walking unaccompanied, foregoing makeup and jewelry, and ridiculing coquettishness” (Whittaker 38–39), and leading “a life style often involving fictitious marriages, bisexual communes, and ménages à trois” (Whittaker 42). If that weren’t enough, Russian women were also thought to behave recklessly with no concern for anyone but themselves (Gagliardi, “Organisatorisches” 628). In view of the comments on their masculine appearance, unusual political and intellectual interest, and independence (they would meet with men and women unchaperoned) (Feller 294), the Swiss clearly perceived Russian women as embracing the habitus of men. Russian women did not just engage with prosthetic masculinity, such as smoking cigarettes.18 By entering university, participating in intellectual discussions, and moving about freely in public, they also cracked the spatial and institutional bastions of masculinity. Once they were part of these institutions, Russian

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women had the courage to take up space unabashedly. As Gagliardi noted, these women were impertinent enough to seize the best places in any auditorium (“Organisatorisches” 628; “Die Russenfrage” 781). Female Russian students dared what Swiss women did not dare do. For Swiss men, this seemed like a tremendous imposition. The many remarks about their presence in the city of Zurich, and their loud voices in the street and in the overflowing lecture halls, point to this fact (Gagliardi, “Organisatorisches,” 635; see also Moser 266). Russian women’s visual performance of masculinity may have served as a painful reminder that masculinity was not inherent to the male body but a resource to be used and abused. Similar to how Butler explains the subversive potential of the butch-lesbian, Russian women’s masculine self-presentation “mocks the notion of a true gender identity” (Butler 137). Consequently, the discursive explosion about Russian women’s masculine habitus could be seen as one of the ways in which the Swiss dealt with the contestation of European male hegemony. In stark contrast to her Russian contemporaries, Leontieva was hardly ever characterized as masculine. There is one short passage in The Story of Tatiana where witnesses at the trial supposedly commented on her “deep, almost masculine, voice” (12). Besides that, she was always referred to as either girlish or feminine. As I argued earlier, it was this show of “high femininity” that allowed her to pass as a genteel lady of the European elite. In that sense, Leontieva’s intervention did not visibly queer traditional gender norms, which does not mean that it was less subversive. On the contrary, Leontieva’s high femme performance effectively lulled the innocent bystanders and the mass media consumer, offering visual reassurance of her “true” identity as a European woman. The seeming self-evidence of her appearance initially reaffirmed traditional gender norms. This made the impending blow all the more potent.

Fictitious Marriages and Russian Seductresses Certain Swiss and German students noted a change in Russian women around 1906. While the first generation of female Russian students needed to enter into fictitious marriages in order to be granted permission to leave home and study in Europe, later generations did not need to resort to similar ploys.19 Studying in a foreign country had become a somewhat accepted choice. The first wave of émigré women had been perceived as excessively masculine. However, Russian women who came to Switzerland after the

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Revolution of 1905 were supposedly more feminine in appearance, more likeable, and politically less compromised (Neumann 181). As Brupbacher, a Swiss medical student at the time, put it, they were no longer just “married to the Revolution” but had become “Renaissance people,” practicing as much “free love” as possible (Brupbacher, 60 Jahre 133–34).20 Newspapers, however, were not so interested in the change. To them, Russian women were either fanatical about the Revolution and/or busy seducing Swiss male youth (Neumann 178; Moser 267–68). As one commentary put it: “The Russian woman took up studying, and ditched all moral barriers—she tours the world, pregnant with revolutionary thought.”21 It was believed that these Russian women with their sham marriages were threatening the moral fabric of Swiss society. Sexual excesses, debauchery, and entanglements seemed to worry Swiss journalists. In December 1906, the Berner Volkszeitung reported, for example, that “9/10th of all impressionable Swiss high school students had fallen prey to the revolutionary devil and were in the clutches of Russian female students.”22 And another newspaper was appalled at the declaration of the Russian Women’s Congress, which stated that “marriage was antiquated, free love was better and polygamy ideal.”23 The free love ideals and seduction techniques of Russian women served as an explanation for the popularity of socialism among young Swiss workmen. Right around the time of the murder, widespread factory strikes had unsettled Swiss labor peace. Predictably, it was Russian revolutionaries who were held responsible for instigating Swiss workers. The summer of 1906 was especially conflict-ridden. The Swiss army was summoned to forcefully put down the metalworkers’ and masons’ strikes, events that were later referred to as the “Summer of the Cossacks,” a questionable analogy between Swiss repressive measures and so-called “Russian conditions” (Moser 273). According to historian Brigitte Studer, anti-anarchist sentiments were running high in Switzerland at the turn of the century (“Antikommunismus”). The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland was established in 1891 to better monitor anarchists and their seductive ploys. Three years later the National Assembly passed an Anarchist Bill, an addition to the national Penal Law to further more efficient prosecution of anarchist crimes. In such a climate, Leontieva—like many foreign anarchists before and after her— could have easily been represented as the instigator of Swiss workers’ strikes. The government could have discredited the socialist workers’ movement as being similar to the terrorist act committed by Le-

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ontieva (Moser 282; Collmer 296). From that perspective, that Leontieva was let off so easily seems like a missed opportunity. So why was Leontieva not encoded as a Russian seductress? What made her different from her female Russian counterparts? More generally, who was seducing whom? Had these female students been seduced and “impregnated” by revolutionary thought or did they do the seducing, manipulating Swiss (male) youth to become socialists and strikers? And what about Swiss newspapers’ reports on free love? Were they not trying to seduce their readership into believing the myth of the masculine Russian vamp? Underlying the construction of the masculine Russian seductress is the “assumption that sexual desire itself is masculine, so that while feminine women may participate in sexual acts, they do so as the objects rather than the subjects of desire” (Walker 4). The stereotype of the masculine Russian seductress not only served to irrationalize and feminize Swiss men’s interest in socialist reform. It also reinforced norms of traditional European femininity as inherently tied to female sexual passivity. Leontieva did not fit this picture. She might have appeared too feminine to be thought of as one of the aggressive Russian seductresses Swiss men were deemed to fall prey to. She might have seemed too informed and composed to be shelved as the innocent victim of revolutionary “impregnation.” Instead, she seemed very much focused on planning her impending “wedding” with the Revolution. The overt symbolism —she was wearing a virginal white dress to commit the murder—supports this claim. Leontieva had entered a fictitious marriage of her own.

The Russian Other The Swiss revolutionary self-image did not encompass socialist and anarchist ideals. The revolutionaries’ quest to both overthrow government structures and revolutionize society at large seemed too radical for most Swiss (Collmer 292). The fundamental change that Russian anarchists envisioned and the violent actions they subscribed to were believed to be at odds with the sweet serenity of the alpine republic. In consequence, the Russian presence was depicted as part of a “foreign infiltration” (Collmer 296). According to Peter Collmer, the neo-racist, anti-Semitic discourse on Russian political immigrants legitimized the restrictions on immigration that the Swiss started to enforce more forcefully at the turn of the century (296). By 1906, the Swiss press demanded that the aliens’ police enforce stricter measures to prevent fanatics from committing violent acts (“Ueber das Attentat” 4; “Ein Attentat in Interlaken” 3). This growing distrust of

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socialists and especially the Russians among them was not to debunk the national myth of an open Switzerland, however. In fact, Switzerland had been following a dual immigration policy all along without ever acknowledging it (Collmer 296 –98). Swiss discourse on foreign infiltration reveals how much work it took to create a proper Swiss identity, i.e. one that was open to some and increasingly closed to others, one that set itself off from an Italian, French, and German identity and still qualified as European. For this, the Swiss national project relied on the Russian Other. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung and presumably its educated bourgeois readership were convinced there were irreconcilable differences between Russians and Europeans: Russian souls are as borderless as Russian plains. Both the people and the tsar try to overcome their inner dullness. Hence, countries are conquered and lost, battles fought incessantly. Emerging is the largest empire and most predatory since Rome. It is no Rome, however, lacking the power to rule, the competence to govern, the gift of proper culture. Therefore, Russia borrows culture and inspiration from everywhere; with Slavic malleability it absorbs everything, Parisian talk, German immigrants’ labor, and money and ideas from everywhere. Despite its apparent new wealth and superficial manifestation of Europeanness, Russia will be Russia, soft and cruel, a world of ecstasy and abomination, of fraternity and barbarism, of magical extravagance and unimaginable misery.24

The Berner Volkszeitung went a step further in its description of Russia and its people. Not only was Russia compared to the ceaseless spreading of poisonous weeds and the dissemination of polluting semen,25 but Russians were described as “Slavic” and/or “half-Asian,” “oriental,” “un-Christian,” “devilish,” “emotionally uncontrollable,” “immoral,” and predictably, “non-European” (Neumann 98; Moser 267; Collmer 400 –6). They were called Nihilists, Anarchists, and Terrorists, these words used almost synonymously (Neumann 171).26 In addition, anti-Semitic remarks were used frequently to characterize the Russians (Collmer 405).27 Commentators often referred to “their exotic habitus, foreign lifestyle and the strong presence of the Jewish element” (Gagliardi, “Organisatorisches” 627–29). Neo-racist references were just as common: “We do not want to be ‘russified’; we want to develop nationally by excision of these infiltrating, foreign and polluting elements. The murder in Interlaken should open eyes and lead to the conclusion: Away with the Russians, provided that it is in agreement with the laws of our country and its international commitments.”28

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The anxiety over the “Russification” of Switzerland stands in stark contrast to the fixed notion of national identity professed in the description of “Russians will be Russians.” No matter how much European culture Russians might rob, they will always fail to be anything but Russian. Swiss identity, however, was seen to be more malleable and open to the dangers of “Russification.” The stereotype of the female Russian student fit neatly into this more general representation of “the Russian,” their knack for imitation, the way they were seemingly used to copying men, pretending to be students, imitating Europeans, and lying about marriage: in short, faking being something they were not. In a process of Othering, the Swiss press basically encoded Russia and its people as everything that Europe was not. Russia clearly served as the “barbarian” foil for Europe’s highly civilized nations, Russian women’s masculinity and lack of sexual restraint standing in for the borderless, anarchist “nature” of the entire empire. Within this neo-racist conception of national identity, their barbarian yet exotic nature always shone through. It may not come as a surprise that the construction of Russia as the Other of Europe coincided with an anxiety over the “Russification” of Switzerland, and over Swiss identity generally. In fact, the threat of a looming “Russification” tied in with a more general identity crisis. Concern was frequently expressed over the lack of proper Swiss culture and the influence of Switzerland’s neighbors: “Distancing ourselves as German speaking Swiss is particularly difficult. The Swiss-German’s cultural closeness to Germany is much stronger than the relationship between the French speaking Swiss and France.”29 Foreigners comprised 12 percent of the Swiss population at the turn of the century, far more than any of its European neighbors.30 The vast majority hailed from neighboring countries such as Germany, Italy, France, and Austria (in that order). Russians came in fifth, even though they formed just 1 percent of the foreign population. When the Swiss welcomed refugees who had fought for liberal ideals, they empathized with their political beliefs, which in turn served to encode the Swiss nation as both humanitarian and politically progressive. The Swiss had achieved what others were still fighting for: a constitutional nation-state. Two myths were instrumental in constructing and consolidating Swiss identity: first, the myth of an open and inclusive stance toward immigration,31 second, the belief that the Swiss democratic constitution was more “advanced” and “liberal” than its neighbors’. Constructing their constitutional democracy as unique at a time when similar endeavors in neighboring countries had miserably failed allowed the Swiss to set them-

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selves apart from their neighbors, without disavowing a common European culture. This may explain why Swiss newspapers’ encoded Russians as the barbarian, uncivilized Other. It was in this climate of hostility against Russians that Leontieva faked being European. And although Russians were believed to be fundamentally different from Europeans, Leontieva effectively passed as European. The way she carried herself, her elegance and femininity, let her fit in perfectly at the grand Hotel Jungfrau, so well in fact, that even a French journalist could not imagine she was a Russian. Leontieva’s “high femme” performance did not conform to the European stereotype of the female Russian student (“masculinity without men”). As we will see in the next section, neither did it comply with the tsarist image of the Russian woman corrupted by liberal Europe.

Passing as a Tsarina-in-Waiting Swiss government officials were worried about Russians committing crimes on Swiss soil. They were even more afraid of the repercussions that Russian students conspiring against their empire would have on Swiss diplomatic relations with Russia (Collmer 329). Baynac argues that reports “began by pointing out that soon after some of these young women abruptly disappeared from Switzerland, they turned up on the front pages of Russian newspapers where their attentats and sometimes their deaths by hanging were reported” (Baynac 43). Tsar Alexander II, who had been somewhat open to reforms in the beginning of his reign, was not pleased with the increasing number of women migrating to European university towns. According to Whittaker, the Russian government feared that these women would return home Europeanized, showing no interest in retaining Russian traditions (Whittaker 56). Moreover, female students had long been identified as unruly in Russia. According to the historian Richard Stites, Russian women’s quest for education was seen as intimately connected to acts of political violence in late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury Russia (1978). Russian upper-class women, no longer content to “chatter . . . in French, play . . . with a piano and dress . . . in the latest Parisian fashion,” started participating in student rebellions (qtd. in Whittaker 38). A controversy about women’s place in society ensued: “A developed mind . . . kills femininity and weakens maternal instinct,” the opponents of women’s higher education argued (50). Linking women’s university education to the Revolution and masculinity legitimated the decision to bar women from university in Russia.

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This, in turn, led to the first wave of Russian women entering European universities in the 1860s. In 1873, the Tsar issued another ban, barring Russian women from studying in Zurich. Whittaker argued that “Since the number of women threatened to increase, the Russian government became alarmed and attempted to discredit the Zurich community as a center of abortion-training and free love” (Whittaker 54; see also Gagliardi, “Organisatorisches” 636). It wasn’t just the fear of freer European social mores that concerned the Russian government. The ban was also motivated by a need for teachers in Russia. It is no coincidence that right around that time, the government started to promulgate the idea that Russian women were best kept “within the Russian frontier” (Whittaker 55). As an incentive, the government established medical courses for women in Russia yet their availability was uncertain: open one day, closed the next. This incertitude resulted in many women choosing to study in Europe.32 By the time Leontieva was old enough to enter university, the way had been paved by thousands of Russian women who had studied in their home country and abroad. Like female Russian students before her, her decision to forgo university studies and to fight for the Revolution was influenced by involvement in student discussion circles. When she returned to Russia in 1905, she slipped into the role of a tsarina’s “lady-in-waiting,” acting as if she was striving to become a royal companion attending to the tsarina’s every need. Her goal was to legally gather information for the Social Revolutionary Party’s Combat Organization (Baynac 76). According to Boris Savinkov, the governor’s daughter had no problem passing as a lady of Russian high society (Savinkov 86). She played her role perfectly. In fact, she even managed to hide her sympathy for the Revolution from her parents. She was, however, playing a role. Leontieva is supposed to have confessed to Savinkov that this was not always easy: I constantly have to conceal, plot and lie—particularly to my mother. This is very difficult for me. Also, this mingling only with people I don’t respect means I have to make an appearance in the salons, attend all their parties, and don’t dare miss a single ball. All this forces me to act like those young aristocrats that I detest. At times I no longer know who I am. I hate that too. I want to act, and then leave. (Baynac 82; also Savinkov 86)

At one point, she was instructed to infiltrate a ball in honor of the Tsar as a flower seller (Knight 152). She proposed to kill the Tsar and probably would have, with or without the permission of the central committee, had the ball not been cancelled (Savinkov 68).

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The fact that Leontieva passed in both Russian and European high society points to the subversive effect of false identity. Her upbringing, as well as her commitment to “conceal, plot and lie” for the Revolution, allowed her to infiltrate tsarist circles without being uncovered. Had her habitus been more masculine, she would have been suspected of being a social revolutionary tainted by European decadence.33 At the same time, her strategic deployment of traditional markers of European high femininity enabled her to pass as a true member of European haute société in Interlaken where a more masculine impersonation would have failed. Leontieva turned out to be neither a European lady nor a tsarina-in-waiting. Interestingly enough, it was never confirmed that she was a member of any terrorist brigade either.34 A Russian waif pretending to be a Swedish wife, Leontieva proved Russians and Europeans wrong about their understanding of national identity. Her high femme performance ruptured, deliberately or not, the assumption that the identity of a person is reflected in her outer appearance, and that which a person enacts is a true expression of self. Hence, Leontieva may have used the myth of the masculine Russian woman to her own advantage. She presented to both Europeans and Russians what they imagined to be most natural: their own vision of normative femininity. In this view, she managed to effectively trouble the intimate relationship between gender, nation, and class. As a feminine Russian woman she was neither the classless fake man envisioned by Europeans, nor the Europeanized libertarian imagined by Russians. In the end, this not only upset the unquestioned correlation between national identity and certain visible markers of gender and class, but it also dismantled the notion of an essential or true identity altogether. The impossibility of keeping these supposedly different identities apart could not have been better demonstrated than by Leontieva herself when she jumbled up national identities and mistook a French tourist for a Russian despot.

A Female Russian “Terrorist” Turned Swiss National Hero At the time of the murder, thousands of Russians were calling Switzerland their temporary home. As we have seen, the Swiss did not have much sympathy for them and were troubled by the lack of morals these “foreign elements” displayed.35 The fact that Leontieva gained the support of the general public and that her sentence was so mild thus requires some explanation. Leontieva’s case was associated with the large number of Russian students at Swiss universities at a time when Swiss universities desperately

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tried to decrease the numbers of Russian students. Leontieva committed a murder when government officials saw the Swiss reputation threatened by Russians plotting on its territory (Riggenbach 2008). The public’s sympathy for Leontieva is even more surprising if one considers the national discourse around foreign infiltration, and the European stereotype of Russia as a barbarian empire. The question of why Leontieva was popular with the Swiss has kept historians guessing. Novelist Baynac insinuates that Leontieva had fooled the jury and the public alike: “Tatiana’s acting skills should not be forgotten— skills that for us (but only for us) were effectively shown at her trial” (54). Others supposed that the Swiss thought that they owed it to their liberal tradition to support a Russian woman’s need to resort to violence. After all, in her home country she lacked the freedom that only Swiss people experienced fully (Collmer 336). The myth of the liberated and liberal nation state—its magnanimous asylum policy for those who unsuccessfully fought for democracy in their own country— could have influenced Swiss public opinion. The Swiss prided themselves on empathizing with David’s fight against Goliath. In particular, they identified with William Tell’s courage to stand up against the Habsburg reign. In fact, Leontieva’s mild sentence for the murder of a tourist, whom she thought to be the former Russian Minister of the Interior, may be partly explained by her lawyer’s and the press’s reference to the Swiss William Tell saga. As the legend goes, in 1307, Gessler, a Habsburg bailiff hung his hat on top of a pole and ordered the Swiss residents of Uri to bow before it. William Tell shot the hat with an arrow (Harrison). Tell was arrested and ordered to shoot an apple balanced on his son’s head. He was promised freedom if he managed to part the apple in two, which he did, without harming his son. Tell said, however, that if he had hurt his son, he would have killed the bailiff, which got him arrested a second time. He managed to escape and kill the bailiff. As the legend goes, his act of defiance sparked a rebellion, which led to the formation of the Swiss confederation. The saga first started circulating in 1470, although it did not achieve international fame until the nineteenth century. The legend entered the literary canon—Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell written in 1803– 04 (2004)— and reportedly influenced both French and Russian revolutionaries. And it became a major component of Swiss national identity construction. When Leontieva’s lawyer compared her, a Russian woman, to William Tell, a Swiss folk hero, he clearly had a specific goal in mind (Neumann 96). The analogy was supposed to make her actions intelligible to the Swiss,

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to make her one of “us.” According to the socialist newspaper Berner Tagwacht, her contemporaries identified with Leontieva, a woman who “took not only William Tell’s songs but also his deeds to heart or did the man from the Tagblatt [conservative newspaper Berner Tagblatt] actually believe that Tell killed Gessler with a kiss?”36 The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society drew on the comparison as well. A month after the verdict and upon Fritz Wittels’s request, the Society discussed the Leontieva case briefly. For Wittels, a woman’s violence was sexual in nature and closely linked to her hatred of men, a hatred motivated by the fact that men were granted more liberties (Protokolle 156; also Baynac 244).37 Freud agreed with him: Women were roused to take up arms due to “suppressed eroticism,” emotions that were usually directed toward the father (Protokolle 154; also Baynac 243). “There is something similar in Schiller’s Tell where the hatred of the father, which is behind Gessler’s assassination, breaks through in an entirely different place, namely, in the parricide scene,” they concluded (Rank, qtd. in Baynac 244). To them, the interpretation of Leontieva’s murder as a “political act” only served to conceal her deep hatred against men and her desire to kill a man, any man (Wittels, qtd. in Protokolle 156). Like the psychoanalysts who could not see the political motivation behind Leontieva’s act, the public also divorced her persona from anarchist politics. Collmer concludes that it did not support Leontieva’s political motives as such. He contends that the Swiss merely expressed a more general solidarity for the victim of a despotic regime (336). This wave of solidarity, I argue, was an effect of her alignment with national folk hero William Tell, which successfully detracted from her political radicalism. This combined with her expert performance of “high femininity” may explain both the Swiss people’s compassion and the jury’s light sentence. Even so, Leontieva’s case shows that Russian revolutionary women were not so easily relegated to the place of the Other. Quite the contrary, they left their mark on Swiss society in more than one way. When she was compared to William Tell, Leontieva not only underwent a symbolic sex change but she became one of “us.” Ironically, by professing Leontieva’s likeness to William Tell, the Swiss media were complicit in her infiltration of the Swiss cultural imaginary.

Russian Women’s “Infiltration” of Europe So far, this essay has discussed how Russia had been perceived as the barbarian side of European culture. These— often neo-racist, sexist, and anti-

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Semitic—metaphors and analogies certainly served to construct an antagonist figure in the process of consolidating European national identities. But what if we take seriously these warnings against an unstoppable “Russification”? In the last part of this essay, I would like to explore a metaphor that circulated at the time: the “polluting seeds,” sown by Russian women on Swiss territory. A female Russian student’s lifestyle was incompatible with European norms of femininity. Not only did these students move higher education into the realm of the possible for certain women, but they also introduced egalitarian communitarian ideals to the Swiss. Most Russians had no time or interest in getting acquainted with Swiss culture and society, especially since their impression of the Swiss was that of an indifferent, apolitical, and greedy lot (Neumann 136, 170). Once enrolled in a university, Russian women were passionately involved in an intellectual exchange with other anarchists and socialists. Contrary to what the Swiss claimed, intellectual exchange was a priority. Russians’ living quarters were usually basic, and they lived cheaply on the food provided by the communal dining hall (Neumann 138). They would also organize readings and discussions there. Books could be found at the Russian library. The dining hall, library, and discussion circles were three important institutional spaces created by Russian émigrés in Switzerland. Nevertheless, some Russian women did befriend Swiss men and women. One such woman was Lydia Petrovna. She started seeing Fritz Brupbacher from Zurich, who also subscribed to socialist thought (Huser Burgmann 2003). The two eventually married, not because they believed in the institution but because Petrovna returned to Russia to work as a zemstvo doctor. It was the easiest way for her to come back to Switzerland if necessary (Neumann 174, 178). They vowed never to live together and to only spend working holidays in each other’s company (Brupbacher, 60 Jahre 88). Their marriage contract granted economic and erotic freedom to both. It also included a passage on their decision not to have children. Starting a family would keep them from fighting for the Revolution. Brupbacher and Petrovna never lived together for an extended period of time. Instead, they wrote to each other daily. To Brupbacher, this felt like being married to the Revolution. His correspondence with Petrovna focused on the Revolution and their entire relationship was also shaped by it. Gender equality between men and women was a living reality for many Russian students and they found the Swiss “backward” in that respect: In their view, Swiss women were completely without rights (Feller 294). Even a Swiss socialist newspaper conceded that “Europeans took good care to

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look away when they could actually learn something from Russia, in the domain of equality between the sexes” (Volksrecht, March 3, 1899, qtd. in Moser 265). Much turn-of-the-century literature about women’s emancipation in Europe referred to Russian women as pioneers either for their enjoyment of civil rights, because they “constituted the majority of any female contingent in European universities, or for their greater acceptance as professionals” (Whittaker 60). However, the strong female Russian presence in Switzerland did not just push women’s higher education, women’s liberation, and collective forms of living into the realm of the possible. In addition, rumors soon circulated that these women were practicing “free love.” These rumors had some truth to them. There was an active “free love” movement and female Russian intellectuals such as Emma Goldman did help shape it. Libertarian views of “free love” and sexual freedom were critical of both the church and the state’s interest in marriage: “ . . . marriage, or the training toward it, prepares the woman for the life of a parasite, a dependent, helpless servant, while it furnishes the man the right of a chattel mortgage over a human life” (Goldman, “What I believe,” 57). Goldman even compared marriage to prostitution. For her, committing oneself to a life with one man was no different from selling oneself to many men (“Traffic in Women”). To avoid such an outcome, it was crucial for women to be recognized as human beings rather than sex commodities; hence, Goldman not only denounced all legal and economic barriers to women’s freedom, but she was also adamant about the fact that “ ‘internal tyrants’ thwart and cripple women” (Shulman 8). Goldman and her contemporaries propagated the right to be with whomever one loved, the right over one’s body, and the right to free motherhood. In this understanding, women had the right to refuse to bear children if they didn’t want any; in short, women were no longer servants to the church, the state, society, the husband, and the family (Goldman, “What I believe” 58; also Shulman 13). “If you suffer from loneliness as an emancipated professional woman, go out and practice free love,” Goldman basically suggested (Shulman 14). This radical sexual discourse affected Swiss people’s lives (Neumann 181–82). One example is Fritz Brupbacher who documented how the “economic and erotic freedom” that he and Lydia Petrovna granted to each other in their marital contract impacted his life (Brupbacher, 60 Jahre 88). One might be tempted to conclude that the large number of unaccompanied Russian women in public spaces and their perceived lack of morals visibly troubled Swiss life and lifestyle. The extensive media campaign

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about their “polluting” effect supports this claim. The public visibility of female independence and free love ideals made new modes of living thinkable for Swiss women and men while Russian women’s strong presence at university changed Swiss perception on both women and higher education. In this respect, the Russian women’s visual and habitual performance of difference enabled these women to leave their mark on Swiss society.

Conclusion Even after the trial, Leontieva’s identity remained slippery, difficult to pin down: “Heroine, Murderess, Madwoman?” a journalist asked (“Zum Urteil” 3). Was she Swiss, Russian, Finish, Swedish, tsarina-in-waiting, terrorist, anarchist, man, woman? As I have argued, the Swiss myth of the masculine Russian revolutionary woman visibly troubled both gender and national identity. Leontieva’s case of mistaken identity shows, however, that an intervention that did not rely on marking visible difference was just as unsettling. The way Leontieva’s high femme performance passed in different contexts “subvert[ed] the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mock[ed] both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity” (Butler 137). More generally speaking, it disrupted the concept of identity and its intimate ties to visibility. On the one hand, I read the construction of the Russian Other as an attempt at securing Swiss identity as both European and uniquely Swiss. On the other, I argued that the Russian influence could not be easily relegated to the place of the Other, as demonstrated by Leontieva’s change of nationality and sex (when she was compared to national hero William Tell). The “polluting Russian seed” could not be contained. Against the notion of an essential and static national identity, this Russian woman-man also managed to infiltrate the cultural imaginary of the Swiss. Leontieva, in her role as Tell, did not keep to the margins but moved to center stage. It is entirely possible, of course, that her case might have been ab/used to bolster the Tell legend, a national myth that supports exclusion as a necessary survival strategy of the Swiss underdog. Still, Swiss anxiety over a proper national identity points to the fact that identity formation was all about lying, faking, and pretending. The fact that a feminine Russian student-terrorist was allowed to walk in the imaginary footsteps of a masculine Swiss national hero effectively reveals how internally incoherent and fractured national identity constructions are.

Straight Migrants Queering European Man Nacira Guénif

In the late 1950s, the Europeanization of France coincided with its deimperialization, yet it was a culturally uncertain paradigmatic shift.1 France as a nation and as a notion had undergone an unprecedented metamorphosis since the French Revolution. Contemporary France is faced with the task of actually implementing its democratic values around ethnic, gender, and social issues. The change also unearthed forgotten internal and external boundaries that were, until recently hitherto concealed by the vestigial presence of the exotic confined to the outback of the Empire, this presence today rooted in its very center and repackaged as western democracies. The sudden emergence of the exotic within postcolonial Europe, namely the bodies of migrants and post-migrant minorities, is staged in racialized and sexualized locations never quite named before. These groups embody hybridized ways of being, becoming and belonging, and reveal the unexpected racial/sexual divide in France. This local brand of the color line is constructed to save Frenchness from the threat of multiplying and proliferating contaminations. Racial invisibility by geographical separation during colonialism transforms into segregation in urban areas. This leads to the emergence of a continental color line that follows the lines of an 69

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eroticized attraction /repulsion to the other undermining Frenchness. As a result, the long-lasting process of domestication and civilizing (Cocklin; Stoler and Cooper) is performed through an ongoing orientalist drama where the culprit and the victim act in the political arena, in the public life of things and human beings, as well as in fictional productions. Such locations display new European figures that exceed old national boundaries and merge with refreshed inscriptions still to be described. In order to sketch them out one must consider the conversion of migrants and their offspring into an assemblage of individualities and processes that can no longer be poured into the bottle of straight national identities. This essay analyzes facts and narratives, past and present, of local and transnational figures that illustrate France’s reluctance to accept encounters with morphing identities that confound binary logic. I propose to provide a queer reading of three examples of how Europe is incapable of moving beyond its imperialistic universal ideology and still forced to recognize that it has reached its limits. In the following section, I argue that the return of the European Man is a compensation for the threat of queer migrant bodies that confront Europe’s inability to imagine itself outside a white malefemale binary.

The White European Man Strikes Back The white European man is alive and back. Fully equipped, or so it seems, strongly determined to fight for his hegemony, deeply rooted in his place, he appears in a reloaded narrative. His objective is to survive. A tautology, the “European man” can potentially experience queer, dual, multiple selves.2 Yet, the human species thus named tends to dismiss such options by resolutely standing on the straight side. Such an apparently impossible stance depends on a dubious and ambiguous will to re-discover and cover over in oneself the traces of the paradigmatic other: the woman. Europe was originally a female alien and mythical persona available for seduction, abduction, and childbearing. Europa, the female Asian figure who was abducted from her group, eternally lost to her family and people, remains that paradigmatic other. As the myth goes, Zeus, the king of gods, abducted Europa who went on to give birth to his male children. They created cities and populated provinces that eventually became named after their mother, thus constituting Europe. Her forced exile soon becomes part of a larger narrative of lost children, separated families, and homesickness. Interestingly, that story should still be pertinent but remains unacknowledged in the invention of a conquering continent and in its recent

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recast during the constitutional debate on its cultural “roots.” Europe is mother-earth, the receptacle of a common matrix united first by Hellenism and then Christianity; it has persisted in the western part of a continent separated from its eastern center. Both Europe and Christianity are fuelled by the desire to save themselves, then and now, from the powerful influences and attractions of the Orient. Just as the future European man separates himself from his constitutive femininity by repeating the Hellenes’ gesture, he also disconnects himself from the temptations of the Orient as the epitomizer of the Other (Loraux 173–75, 218–19; Said 342– 43). De-feminizing and de-orientalizing are the flip sides of the same European coin.3 Men who are from this province of the world view themselves as the quintessential representative of a human species entitled to impose its design on all others. The forgotten connection between European man and Europa, I argue, opens the space of queerness. A European who names himself after a female figure constantly strives to erect and enforce the male character of his female land. For the observer of today’s remnants of Europe, the specific coup de force is the ability that Europeans, mostly and mainly men of power, have shown in expanding a local cosmology. These men were sometimes female bodies such as Elizabeth the First of England, Isabel of Spain, Christine of Sweden, Catherine of Russia, or the spouses of kings. Their view became global so that it translates and subsumes any other alternative voice. The European man first appeared on the so-called European continent where he invented himself after a long process of warring and destroying, and then congregating, collaborating, and merging. He was then to be encountered in various regions where he traveled not only to accumulate power but also to search for his identity as a specific mutation of mankind. The European man has now returned to his birthplace from where he longs for his once magnificent status. This narrative is Europe’s foundational discourse and has been troubled and reawakened by recent debates on legal bodies. For example, the presence of aliens beyond gates, walls, and their retention, once they illegally penetrate Schengen space has become a metaphor of the European body’s integrity. His return to the homeland results in a growing desire to lock oneself in and lock others out. Nothing good, no energy, no life, and no promise can come from distant others, especially female, which contradicts the myth of Europa and the original spiritual trip of the breathtakingly beautiful daughter of Tyre’s king. Fortress Europe replaces kingdoms once boldly turned toward the exploration of oceans and whose existence was made possible by centuries of mutual massacres and wars meant to

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protect. To assess the presence and existence of the recent variants of European man, one needs to locate his most recent appearances and recount his latest accomplishments and statements. They range from claims of Europe’s Christian heritage to the quest for national identity in times of post-national economies, from loud moral panics about minarets to subtle anxieties of the loss of ethnic purity, from old narratives of female abductions to new metaphors of virginity (Surkis), from dismissed radical feminism to the new fashionable defense of women’s rights by an antisexist patriarchy, from old Christian anti-Semitism to new Muslim anti-Semitism while Muslims are being the convenient locus of anti-Semitism rephrased as Islamophobia. Consequently, the European man’s return deserves attention for its various displays and slogans. I propose to reframe his reappearances by queering them through the lens of gender and color. So far, many Europeans refuse to explore a wide range of apparently new configurations of relations and action by resubmitting the idea that the blurring is due to the presence of a wide range of others present. They prefer to entertain the illusion that something has become incomprehensible and inexplicable about today’s Europe.

Colonized to Migrate, Migrants to Colonize In Europe, the “invention of decolonization” (Shepard) has gradually opened an era of postcolonial mixture and confusion often reduced to a mere inversion of flows: conquest yesterday, migration today. Despite appearances, colonization and containment are similar and proceed from the same ontology: alterity is necessary and yet must be kept at a distance. In other words, colonization is still about containment and detention, so that today’s detention centers and retention camps exemplify renewed processes of colonization as a response to unpredictable patterns of mobility by the world’s poor. Hence, those who conquer are not those who migrate and vice versa. Conquest was never reduced to or perceived as migration and, symmetrically, migration does not fall into the category of conquest. Conquest and migration have to do with different intentions, projects, mental landscapes and phenomena, not because they belong to and therefore shape different ecologies but essentially because they are viewed as initiated by different segments of humankind. Conquest in its most recent version (the economic mobility of expatriates or the practice of outsourcing) is the prerogative of the superior layers of mankind whereas forced exile or supposedly chosen migration, is the lot of the subaltern, a poor species, or race of human beings.4 This hierarchy has remained unchanged for centuries

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and still serves to sort out the good fellow from suspicious and/or inept individuals. Today, the racial divide does not play out in the old essentializing way. The shrinkage of former empires and the provincialization of the European nations that survive and in some ways perpetuate them have resulted in a growing suspicion toward newcomers coming from former colonies. More sophisticated strategies are now deployed. Even when Europeans denounce the migrants’ secret conspiracy to transform host nations into fundamentalist backward regimes, nobody believes that they have the skills and the legitimacy to do so. It is precisely their lack of entitlement that highlights their duplicity and bad intentions.

Queering the Migrant Body The meaning of words such as im /migration and in /tegration should not be taken for granted. They are usually not analyzed in the context of power and subjectivity, and, at least in France, not associated with notions of gender and ethnicity. I propose to reconnect the two words to these dimensions and my intention requires a controversial premise. Both words are vernacular—they belong to a specific time and space, the Western (i.e., European) twentieth century, and travel from different yet specific realms of thought and action and get sedimented into discourses on otherness. One of their recent inflections has to do with the idea that migrants and minorities from former colonies and beyond are not able or willing to integrate. Although these words have specific local meanings, they function to give an account of phenomena that are historically recurrent and widespread yet refer to specific geographical and political contexts. Moreover, the confusion between the political and the sociological use of these words partly explains why “integration,” once introduced to understand new structures and new modes of action during the industrial era, has become obsolete (Guénif-Souilamas 2009). I argue that the words reveal more about the societies that use them in the context of situated encounters with others of all kinds. They reveal the specific components of the multilayered configuration that we call nation-states rather than aptly describing the specific groups that they endeavor to describe and manage. The two words are here disentangled and examined separately in order to ask the following questions: Under which circumstance have they become tied to one another? Are such processes relevant for social sciences? Although deeply entrenched in common thought, and among scientists and policy makers, the word “integration” is becoming increasingly

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irrelevant in contemporary France for explaining the complexity of contemporary migration processes. When used as a frame as well as a tool, “integration” distorts facts to comply with the criteria it composes and politically promotes. Similarly, “i /migration” is a problematic attempt to arrest the flux of complex, embodied migrant realities. The state apparatus seeks to convert informal human mobility into a fixed nationalization process, transforming experience into a governmental frame. This process is increasingly utilized by a coalition of nation-states who seek to ward off incoming migrants by extending their borders. For example, migrants who pass through a nation-state on their way to their desired point of arrival can be sent back to the country they passed through by the country of destination. Under this new regime, im /migrants embody otherness but they also represent queer potentialities and configurations, which include among other things, food, religion, dress-code, gender, sexuality, and language. These manifestations are used by the nation-state to gauge the degree of queerness of migrants, especially their children. Here, queering migrant bodies requires thinking gender, sex, and sexuality with race and ethnicity. Despite the radical chic of queer paradigms, the queer migrant body when seen through the lens of race and ethnicity reveals the entrenched biological and patriarchal underpinnings of France and Europe. Sexualizing religion, “religionizing” sexuality, gendering and racializing minority languages, whitening majority national language, sexualizing race, racializing sexuality: This unexpected range of combinations outlines a queer Europe (Detienne 2003). These queer forms often go unnoticed because their visibility is not discernible within the more recognizable modes of identity politics through which migrant, national, and colonial issues are publicly staged. Such queer assemblages expose the fiction of European universalism. A recent example of the queer articulation of sexuality and ethnicity occurred in July 2005 in Paris. A demonstration in support of undocumented migrants was organized when the Ministry of the Interior proposed the deportation of 27,000 sans papiers each year. The state’s strategies included tracking down pupils in primary schools and using them to find their parents who were assumed to have illegally entered the country. Half a million people demonstrated down two parallel streets between Bastille and Nation. Visibly separated from the rest, a small group of a dozen or so people held signs denouncing the disposability of migrants (non à l’immigration jetable!). They were marching for the rights of HIV-positive migrants’ access to healthcare and against deportations, which disregarded

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health conditions. The queerness of this articulation resided in the connection staged between identity politics around migrants and sexuality and healthcare. It was hard to deduce from their appearance (their clothing for example), the relationship between the issue they were bringing up and the larger demonstration’s focus on the sans papiers. Their presence, one could claim, “contaminated” the overwhelmingly straight and familyoriented demonstration. It revealed and critiqued the heteronormativity of the “compassionate” consensus protecting the expelled children and their undocumented parents. However, the group was clearly separated by a spatial no-man’s land, as if the presence of gays and lesbians, especially HIV-positive individuals, might spread their shadow over the huge demonstration. Their lack of “integration” paradoxically made their presence hyper-visible. By buffering themselves from the small group, the majority of the demonstrators, one could claim, kept their distance from the spectacular performances pioneered by AIDS activists in the eighties when they drew attention to the irresponsibility of policy makers (Schehr; Mangeot).5 Ignoring the presence of this specific group created the false assumption that migrants are heterosexual and that those who express solidarity with them are also straight. The following day no journalist reported the presence of this group of demonstrators. The public remains unaware of this intersectional experience of multiple exclusions. The activist group renders visible the situation of gay and HIV-positive undocumented migrants facing deportation. When it comes to migration, queerness is not brought up except when European “crusaders” denounce the homophobia of migrants, especially Muslim ones. Migrants are assumed to be straight, while the queerness of their behavior and mindset is condemned. This queerness is established by a series of mythic equations: Migrants equal Muslim, Muslim equals fundamentalist aliens, and fundamentalist aliens equal potential terrorists. The consequences of this equalization are paradoxical. On one hand, it invents and establishes the “straightness” of migrants (for example, their “traditions”) regardless of the complexities and the cultural and gendered variations they embody. On the other, it invents the queerness of migrants by producing a “queer” discourse of the strangeness of migrants. Migrants are thus categorizable as (straight)forward exemplars of tradition, or as odd, strangely queer embodiments that need deciphering (Guénif-Souilamas and Macé; Massad). In other words, they are both queer and straight but for other reasons than those put forward by the hegemonic discourse. Their queerness is incomprehensible to Western straight minds. These paradoxes merge

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and combine, producing a powerful paradigm of otherness as negativity. This queer other threatens the enforcers of biopolitics by making alternative forms of being, becoming, and belonging possible.

Queer Patriarchal Feminism However, one need not assume that queerness is always counter-hegemonic. This section argues that “queer patriarchal anti-sexism” reorients feminist politics toward a xenophobic agenda. I focus on the gendered framing of Islam as the problem that cannot be absorbed by the discourse of Égalité in Republican France. Following the convergent racial and gender lines which circumscribe the lives of French citizens from visible ethnic and racial backgrounds (Arabs and Blacks), I analyze how the condemnation of an essentialized sexism attributed to migrants works as a decoy to avoid political issues of persisting inequalities. At the same time, identifying the practices (forced marriages, genital mutilation, honor crimes, rape, polygamy, and so on) with Islam, has fueled the essentialization of minorities as subservient to “Islam” and constructed women of migrant and minority groups as objects to be saved. These same minorities are thus viewed as not entitled to claim any sort of equality but rather must constantly prove their loyalty in order to benefit from some generosity on behalf of the dominant group. I argue that French patriarchal anti-sexism relying on a laicized discourse that is both color- and gender-blind undergirds Republican universalism to cover over Frenchness as ethnicity and one of its avatars, the white heterosexual man. In the context of the changing relationships between feminism and religion, it is important to emphasize that laïcité, apparently the opposite of religion, was only recently associated with feminist emancipation. Their late union led to a deceptive bargain. The public discourse governed by white heterosexual men stages recently arrived women on a scene where men and a few female accomplices monopolize the right to speak and target ethnically different migrant groups. This updated civilizing mission conceals patriarchal anti-sexism that passes for French feminism, i.e., it is to a disguised crusade for heteronormativity’s sake in the name of the equality of men and women. This is precisely what is queer about this patriarchal anti-sexism. The examples that follow argue that under the veneer of feminism a patriarchal antisexism, which was always oblivious to women’s rights, is bolstering the boundaries of the nation. Meant to address issues of “women of immigration,” a working group (in which I occupied a critical position) was formed to discuss changes in

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the civil code on marriage. Its main outcome, a 2006 law equalizing the legal age for marriage between men and women, was presented as protecting women of color, that is, Arab and African, from forced marriages. Yet this law makes us forget that it corrects a remnant of the Code Napoléon, while reinforcing the matrimonial institution by making it more suitable to the contemporary interests and habits of the middle class. In the same way, a court case brought by a Muslim man seeking to annul his marriage on the grounds that his wife was not a virgin fueled a heated discussion around the qualités essentielles, the essential, intrinsic qualities of a person tied by a matrimonial contract, and revealed the cynicism of the debate. As Judith Surkis argues, this debate erased the fact that “while the Lille case focused public outrage on this apparent act of patriarchal ‘repudiation,’ the French state’s new annulment powers [since the 2006 law] have been accepted as a matter of course, as a necessary means to fight ‘illegal immigration.’ ” Furthermore, “the clause, which has its origins in medieval Canon Law, was a concession to practicing Catholics who eschewed the ‘divorce by mutual consent’ made available by the 1975 law. Rather than being viewed as a dangerous contamination of a supposedly secular civil code, this seemingly minor accommodation of France’s majority religion was viewed as unremarkable at the time” (2010: 534). The debate in the broader public discourse erased the original Catholic impetus for the amendment and instead transferred the religion-secularism conflict to Islam, and the Muslim husband in particular. Making this argument generates accusations of being an “islamiste” or “islamo-gauchiste” (islamo-leftist). The then Minister of Justice, Rachida Dati, a daughter of Algerian-Moroccan immigrants, played a key role in this queer patriarchal sexist theatre. She is presented as a glamorous and attractive example of successful integration and constructed as the role model for migrants’ children. Since she was a key asset in Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidential election campaign, she was later appointed Minister of Justice. She was known for denouncing suburban male youth while people in the banlieues waited in vain for her to visit the neighborhoods in the wake of social unrest in 2005. Like her white male colleagues, she played the feminist card to distance herself from those she came from. Hence, Dati exemplifies the normative queering of feminism produced by patriarchal anti-sexism on migrant bodies. Normative queering through the civilizing mission is also identifiable in the increasingly patronizing attitude of French feminism toward “brown women.” For example, the recipients of the first Simone de Beauvoir prize were Taslima Nasreen and Ayaan Hirsi Ali in 2008. Another recipient in

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2009 is the “One million signature” campaign on behalf of Iranian women.6 This may be seen as a double iconic embodiment of Muslim women as victims of religiously inspired patriarchal oppression and the latest heirs of the mid-twentieth-century French feminist movement. French feminists’ reduced scope of action thus ignores the continuing patriarchal anti-sexism that fuels hetero-euro-centered power relations. This normative queering contains a paradox. French feminists construct a rejuvenated activist movement, this time through the corridors of power, which are populated mainly by white men whose heteronormative and traditional family values feminists had struggled against. In the context of this despairing situation, feminism could do well to bear yet another paradox, this time more productively queer than the one just encountered. In this essay, I have demonstrated that it is possible to queer Europe. By queering the European man and the migrant body, I show the productivity of the ambiguities erased by civilizational discourse and migrant politics. Patriarchal anti-sexism, on the other hand, produces an equally queer reinforcement of the Universalist status quo. Queering Europe transnationally thus entails both progressive possibilities and the risk of a political backlash.

Queering European Sexualities Through Italy’s Fascist Past: Colonialism, Homosexuality, and Masculinities Sandra Ponzanesi

In Italy, Ettore Scola’s film A Special Day (Italy, 1977) left an indelible mark and continues to be acknowledged as a masterpiece that transcends national cultures and cinematographic traditions. Set at the time of Italian fascism during the 1930s, the film takes radical positions on love and politics. Emerging after neorealism, Italian comedy, and the political cinema of the 1970s, it develops a clear narrative through a polished, yet naturalistic, style that combines different Italian traditions. We could attribute the lasting impact of the film to a number of factors. The lead actors Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren are internationally renowned. Scola is widely respected.1 Further, the film is set during the crucial historical period of the Nazi arrival in Rome under the Mussolini regime. Last, the film is also a moving love story, which might explain its enduring appeal. 2 The film, however, is not a typical love story but stages an unlikely encounter between a housewife and a gay radio reporter, two subjects marginalized by fascism who find solace and mutual understanding in each other. The film promotes the universal values of love and defeat, loneliness

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and marginalization. These issues are historically specific but they transcend their local setting. Crucially for the argument that follows, A Special Day revolves around the issue of Italian queerness under a fascist regime. The film begins with a ten-minute collage of archival footage from Hitler’s visit to Italy on May 8, 1938. Against this background, we first meet Antonietta (Sophia Loren), an uneducated mother of six children and avid supporter of the fascist regime. She meets her neighbor Gabriele (Marcello Mastroianni) when her husband and children are away attending a fascist parade. He is a wellmannered, educated radio announcer and critical of fascism. He seems to be the only one in the building who does not attend the parade. The fascist rally on the radio and the constant interruptions to their conversation by the meddling concierge serve as the continuous background to the events of the film. We witness the growth of an intimate friendship between Antonietta and Gabriele, whose hurt and sorrow reflect the tortured cultural climate of the time. Mastroianni and Loren are strikingly cast against type. Mastroianni, the prototype of the Italian Latin lover, plays a marginalized gay man while Loren, the dominant model of Italian femininity and seduction, portrays a frustrated and ideologically confused housewife, whose desire for Gabriele goes unrequited. The film sets up and then troubles the distinctions between inside/outside, private/public, and the personal/political. The outside world seeps in continually through the radio broadcast of the parade, while the interior is the space of Gabriele and Antonietta’s mundane daily activities (such as dialing the phone, tidying the bedrooms, dancing the rumba, making coffee, picking up the laundry, making an omelet, sorting out books, and so on). The film visually creates a gripping sense of the ideological discrepancy between the official and unofficial history of Italy under fascist rule by focusing on women and homosexuals. In its deceivingly simple structure, the film shows us more about daily life in fascist Italy than most of the films that have directly addressed the issue. It was released in 1977, when fascism had been consigned to the realm of memory or simply forgotten. The issue of homosexuality was not yet part of mainstream culture, despite the prominence of public figures such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was killed under obscure circumstances in 1975. Mastroianni plays the role of a gay intellectual persecuted by the fascist regime. Like women, the Roma, and disabled people, he becomes a deviant and vulnerable outcast. I suggest that by troubling Italian models of virility

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and ideals of masculinity, the film expressed both fascist anxieties vis-àvis an unacknowledged homosexuality but also an Italian anxiety about its model of masculinity. While Mastroianni regularly plays the archetypal Latin lover, he also portrays an insecure man both obsessed with and overwhelmed by women in Fellini’s 8/2 (1963) and La cittá delle donne (1980), an impotent man in Bolognini’s Il bell’Antonio (1960), and a failed macho in Germi’s Divorce Italian Style (1962). In Beyond the Latin Lover: Marcello Mastroianni, Masculinity, and Italian Cinema, Jacqueline Reich argues that “although Mastroianni, as commodity, was often marketed as the quintessential Italian man, his characters betrayed instead a much more conflicting image of Italian masculinity than the category of Latin lover allowed” (xi). Reich’s book focuses on Mastroianni’s cult status and attempts to answer the following questions: How did he come to be perceived as an icon of Italian masculinity given that he so reluctantly performs that role and often tries to eschew it in public interviews? Second, given that most of the characters he played strayed from the ideal male, why was he identified as a Latin lover? Reich argues that “underneath the façade of a presumed hypermasculinity is really the anti-hero, the Italian inetto (inept man), a man at odds with and out of place in a rapidly changing political, social, and sexual environment” (xii). Reich provides a historical framework within which Mastroianni’s characters represent the instability and self-contradictoriness of gender roles in the postwar period. Mastroianni became the prototype of the Latin lover but according to Reich this had less to do with the character he played than with “the commodification of Italy at an international level” (25). She argues that “what was being consumed in La Dolce Vita in 1959 was . . . an Italian style, based on the emergence of Italian design, Italian sensuality, Italian fashion on the international scene” (25). As a result of the rise of an international Western consumer culture, the Italian Latin lover became the “ ‘imagined’ embodiment” of an unrestrained sexuality in opposition to the filmic stereotype of the restrained American (26). The Latin lover mystique surrounding Mastroianni is both a product of an international culture industry (American in particular), and a symptom of the crisis of the representations of masculinity in Italy.3 In representing the specific crisis of masculinity and sexual normativity in Italy during the period of fascism, the film provides an insightful departure-point for thinking the relation between queer and Europe. This essay queers Italy, the place of Italy in Europe, and Europe itself by analyzing the legal and social context within which the crisis played out. The link

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between two dimensions is crucial to this queering: the ambivalent politics of homosexual (in)visibility in Italy, and the specificity of Italian colonialism, particularly the racialization of sexual politics.

Homosexuality and Racial Theories In Fascist Virilities, Barbara Spackman argues that “virility” was the principal node of articulation of Italian fascism. She suggests that “virility is not simply one of the many fascist qualities, but the cult of youth, of duty, and of physical strength and sexual potency that characterize fascism are all inflections of that master term, virility” (xii). She shows how Mussolini presents himself as the “virile” leader who “rapes” the feminized masses. Spackman focuses on the Futurist F. T. Marinetti and on the decadent Gabriele D’Annunzio, often cited as the sources of fascist rhetoric. She explains, that the Marinettian model (characterized by Eve Sedgwick as “homosexual panic” [476]) superimposes national borders onto sexual ones in an effort to stabilize the boundaries between homosociality and homosexuality. In line with nationalism, virility defines and defends itself against femininity, homosexuality, and Bolshevik internationalism. The D’Annunzio model is, on the other hand, one in which virility is defined and molded through the feminine; its opposite is the “adiposity” of “plutocratic” nations, and its model is the paradoxical female virility of Caterina Sforza, the Renaissance virago. Such mixing and matching, I argue, is inimical to the way in which the discourse of fascism-as-regime collapses gender and sex and biologizes both. (Spackman xiii)

Spackman links fascism’s dream of “Autarchia,” or self-sufficiency, to homophobia and xenophobia. Exploring the earlier writing of Marinetti on Italian expansionism, she claims that the crossing of national frontiers both invites and refuses the transgression of boundaries of sexuality. Both homosexuality and colonial ambitions require the presence of other men and other races, while fascism abhors and distrusts their proximity. For the first time, the silence around homosexuality was broken when new laws were introduced. In the new criminal code, the Codice Rocco (1931),4 the concept of race (stirpe) was acknowledged for the first time and, after 1938, homosexuality was criminalized for being “damaging to the prestige of race” (Petrosino, “Traditori,” 93–94). The relationship between homosexuality and colonialism becomes broachable through an analysis of racial theories in the 1930s. In 1936, concerned by Italy’s slow population growth, the fascist government intro-

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duced a new set of laws to protect the purity of the race. One consequence was that for the first time since Unification in 1870, homosexual practices were treated as potentially criminal acts and new taxes against single men were introduced. Yet in the Codice Rocco, there is no specific law against homosexuality (the proposed article n. 528 criminalizing homosexuality was withdrawn in the final version). Social repression remained indirect, given that specific laws would have created a category which was deemed nonexistent.5 Therefore, both in Italy and its colonies, the status of homosexuality was contradictory. On the one hand, as Robert Young remarks, same-sex sexual relations had the advantage of not furthering “miscegenation” as long as they remained conveniently invisible, covert, and unmarked, as the Catholic Church wanted them to be. Young argues that “[f ]ears of racial amalgamation even led to the promotion of homosexuality in the imperial game [that] was, after all, already an implicitly homo-erotic practice” (26). At the same time, homosexuality was also seen as a degenerative product of miscegenation, the result of inadequately controlled sexuality that in turn weakened the race further (Duncan, Reading, 46). The Italian colonial regime’s sexual policy was contradictory: On the one hand, the display of exotic love affairs was encouraged as a sign of Italian virility, while on the other, inter-racial sexual relations were condemned by racial eugenics. During the heyday of Italian colonialism, recruitment campaigns appealed to the virility and superiority of Italian men in order to encourage them to become soldiers, workers, teachers, and entrepreneurs in the far territories of the A.O.I. (Africa Orientale Italiana). Colonial expansion was furthered through a traditional rhetoric of venturing into uncharted and virgin soil supplemented by references to possible encounters with exotic native women. Photographs, advertisements, and literary accounts represented African women as beautiful, docile, and sexually available “Black Venuses.” The sexual metaphor connected public and private spheres and worked as effective propaganda tools. The conquest of women was not only a “metaphor for colonial domination” as Laura Ann Stoler suggests, but also “part of its substance” (“Carnal Knowledge” 54 –55). At the start of Italian colonial expansion, sexual encounters between white colonizers and local women were considered not only normal but desirable.6 They facilitated the regulation of sexuality in the colonies, given that white women were absent except for the wives of important officials. In this specific case, the acceptance of inter-racial sexual contact in Italian colonies was not exceptional. Similar practices were also widespread in other European colonies, as Stoler amply docu-

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mented in her analysis of the practice of concubinage in the French and Dutch empires. She writes that these customs were considered to have a stabilizing effect on the social order and colonial health as it “kept men in their barracks and bungalows, out of brothels and less inclined to perverse liaisons with one another” (“Making” 40). Thus, the colonies appeared as a space of sexual liberation. But these sexual politics had specific implications for the representation of homosexuality and led to a certain ambivalence. Fascist propaganda’s exalting of the athletic male body could not be clearly distinguished from homo-eroticism, even though homosexuality was condemned.7 With the introduction of apartheid laws passed to guarantee the purity of the Italian race, the manifestation of the homophobic / homo-erotic contradiction took a specific form in the Italian colonial context. Rather than replicating the Nazi regime’s strict discriminatory legislation, Italy’s race laws harbored ambivalence around homosexuality.8 The fascist race laws of 1938, targeting primarily Jews and blacks, were being drafted when Mussolini decided to create an African Italian Empire. The creation of a colonial empire coincided with the stricter demarcation of the Italian nation in terms of blood. The clear distinction between Italians and the colonized Africans was supposed to confirm that the former belonged to a superior, nobler Aryan race.

The Italian Paradox: Shadows of Queerness In “Il Paradosso del Razzismo Fascista verso L’Omossessualità” (The Paradox of Fascist Racism Towards Homosexuality) Giovanni Dall’Orto, one of the few scholars to have worked on the intersection between colonialism and homosexuality, shows how homosexuals were reclassified in 1936 in the wake of the passing of new racial laws (1994; 1999). Before that, they had been termed delinquents. The fascists abandoned this category in 1939 when the war broke out and defined homosexuals again as a group of common delinquents. All the homosexuals who had been banned (confined) as “enemies of the race” were sent back home.9 As Dall’Orto points out, one must recognize a group in order persecute it. In the case of anti-Semitism, it is necessary to theorize the existence of race, to argue in favor of a hierarchy between races, and to claim that Jews belong to an inferior racial group. However, in the Italian case, regarding homosexuality, silence and denial are the rule, now as in the past. Homosexuals do not constitute a social group; homosexuality is not a lifestyle or a life choice. It is a deviance, an error, or even a vice (vizio). The homo-

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sexual is perceived as engaging in reprehensible acts not explained by his nature but as a form of deviance. To categorize homosexuals as a threat to the “tutela della razza” (defense of the race) was an unsuccessful way of mimicking Nazi Germany, and was transferred to a cultural context that had developed its own specific history of dealing with homosexuality. In short, the contradiction of defining homosexuals as a “race” alongside Jews and Blacks attributed to them a status and social recognition as deviants and criminals. In the context of Italian colonialism the contradiction took on a racial dimension. The colonial discourse of racial difference intersected with the legal discourse on homosexuality. It undermined the category of homosexuality in racial law making its emergence ambiguous. This decision to categorize homosexuals as “enemies of the race” led to discussion around the exact status of homosexuality as a civil or political crime. Dall’Orto mentions the case of Othello A. who ran a restaurant in Eritrea and was condemned on October 31, 1938 for “undermining the prestige of the race by passively abandoning himself during homosexual acts with a native of Italian Oriental Africa. The problem was not so much the interracial contact per se but the fact that the white man had taken on the passive role in his sexual liaisons, which in Mediterranean masculinist culture corresponds to the role of the dominated” (Dall’Orto, “Il paradosso,” 516 –17, my translation).10 This case made the category of the homosexual male legally visible, contradicting the cultural discourse of Mediterranean masculinity. In 1931, Dall’Orto argues, the legislator had rejected the introduction of anti-homosexual laws because it would have acknowledged the existence of homosexual acts among Italian men, contradicting the model of excessive virility attributed to them. That tradition explains why the new law was so rarely invoked: Between 1936 and 1939 only ninety men were sentenced to internal exile. For seventy years Italians have repeated that homosexuality was a vice typical of English and German people, and now, fascism itself had to admit the inadmissible, that homosexuality existed even in Italy. It is therefore no surprise that the race laws did not bring homosexuality within their purview: the extension of the “defence of the race” policy to homosexuals took place through administrative measures, and not through specific laws as was the case of Nazi Germany. In practice what happened was that 80 homosexuals were sentenced to “political exile” instead of “common crime exile.” That was all. (Dall’Orto, “Il paradosso,” 518, my translation)11

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This is not to say that homophobia did not exist: many instances of anti-gay violence did take place but no trace can be found in the official archives, and the press deemed these incidents unworthy of publicity, hence the absence of historical research on this topic. German fascism was in conflict with its Italian variant because a catholic-Mediterranean mentality preferred one form of discrimination over another. For the Nazis, Jews, non-Aryans, gypsies, people of African descent, homosexuals, and disabled people were considered a potential source of degeneracy. According to Dall’Orto, Italy did not adhere to that world view. He concludes that the refusal to include homosexuals in racial laws was not dictated by a more enlightened vision but by the presence of a social form of repression that was so subterraneous and implicit that it made explicit legal eradication of homosexuality superfluous. Dall’Orto concludes that [d]ue to the persistence of this mentality after the fall of fascism, homosexuality in Italy remains within the realm of whispers, euphemisms, circumlocutions, and masks: a world that is there but does not exist, because it is not allowed to surface in reality. (Dall’Orto, “Il paradosso,” 528, my translation)12

These conclusions tend to support the commonly held view that Italian colonialism and Italian homosexuality were different from the rest of Europe, Northern Europe in particular. First, Italy’s colonial enterprise started when most of the other European empires were collapsing. Further, Italian colonialism was the effect of an unplanned solution to internal economic issues (an imperialism straccione [tramp colonialism]). It was primarily southern Italians that escaped poverty and social unrest by enrolling in the military campaigns in Africa unaware of what they were signing up for. Last, Italian colonialism was perceived as disorganized because it lacked a structured ideology of superiority (hence the myth of Italiani Brava Gente [the nice Italians]). For example, the relative proximity in race and class between the Italians in Africa (originating primarily from Southern Italy)13 and the relatively light-skinned people of Eastern Africa, where a mix of races and religions coexisted with each other, could not sustain a clear dichotomy between colonizer and colonized. This situation of proximity was also theorized by anthropologists such as Giuseppe Sergi, who claimed that Italians were part of a Mediterranean rather than Aryan race (which he considered to be of Barbarian descent) and therefore closer to Africa (1901 [1895]). Sergi controversially placed Ethiopians and Mediterraneans within the same stock (strirpe). According to him, the Medi-

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terranean race, the “greatest race in the world,” was responsible for the great civilizations of ancient times, including those of Egypt, Carthage, Greece, and Rome. They were quite distinct from the peoples of Northern Europe. These theories were developed in opposition to Nordicism, the claim that the Nordic race was of pure Aryan stock and naturally superior to other Europeans. The common origin implied the absence of repulsion between the peoples of the two areas and a desire for union. That view was censored and denied with the rise of Italian fascism. Attempts were made to establish a legal opposition between the colonizer and the colonized through a racial model of superiority that penalized forms of madamismo and meticciato (interracial relationships).14 But as had already happened with anti-homosexuality laws, Dall’Orto explains, very few Italians in the colonies felt threatened by the new legislation and instances of concubinage, and interracial relationships continued, or possibly increased given the larger number of Italian soldiers deployed in Africa during the war against Ethiopia. It could be argued, therefore, that both colonialism and sexual politics around homosexuality in Italy form parts of a disorganized regime. Repression, in other words, remained amorphous and unarticulated, rather than explicit through the state and new legislation or administrative procedures. Further, Italian homosexuality occupies an anomalous place in the European imaginary. The myth of the Mediterranean as the place of origin of the homoerotic ideal of masculinity, as Robert Aldrich (1993) argues, contrasts with the views of the Catholic Church for whom homosexuality is a vice to eradicate.15 The latter tend toward the suppression of discussions on homosexuality in the public sphere while arguing for its elimination in private through silence, denial, and (non-legal) moral correction.

Conclusion Italy occupies a queer place within Europe because of the specific intersection between homosexuality and colonialism. The combination of race laws and the (in)visibility of homosexuality both repeats and undermines the received understanding of the place of Italy within a European imaginary. Italian homosexuality is inherently different from northern European constructs of male same-sex desire as Derek Duncan argues (2006). Given that Italy cannot boast figures such as André Gide and Oscar Wilde, Duncan argues, homosexuality has always been expressed through masking, strategic silences, and productive reticence.16 As a result, the emer-

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gence of a gay and lesbian culture has been slower and more contradictory than elsewhere. This argument, however, runs the risk of perpetuating the Northern European temptation to view minoritized Italy in its alterity. Two commonplaces persist: First, Italy is behind in the cultural process of modernization and in acknowledging unpalatable histories (such as colonialism), contemporary issues (such as xenophobia), and forms of social alterity (such as homosexuality); second, homosexuality has a curious form of visibility in Italian culture since it is neither acknowledged openly, nor denied officially. Given the climate of silent repression and persecution, the gay rights movement is hindered because power in Italy operates through socially diffuse rather than explicitly legal mechanisms. Italian queerness, one could argue, does not connote the excluded other; rather, queerness skews the normativity of gender and racial hierarchies. Precisely for this reason, Italy’s queer position within Europe makes the transfer of primarily United States–based queer theory (for example, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Teresa de Lauretis) to the European context problematic. Europe itself is skewed as an object of queer theoretical inquiry.

Queer, Republican France, and Its Euro-American “Others” Lucille Cairns

Queer theory has a complex relationship with the political. This essay investigates both the productivity and problems of one highly politicized queer critique of the French Republic, from sociologist Marie-Hélène Bourcier. Given France’s historic importance in the construction of the European Union, the French state can be deemed a central European institution. Yet it is distinct from other member countries of the EU in its inimitable brand of republicanism, for which the most common, if not entirely adequate, synonym is “universalism.” One of Bourcier’s prime concerns is the relationship of the French republican state to its sexual, gendered and ethnic minorities. As maître de conférences (senior lecturer / associate professor) at the University of Lille III, Bourcier has an obvious professional foothold inside the institution of l’Université française. But she is also a passionately committed queer activist who positions herself defiantly outside all institutionalized circuits of knowledge production. Hailed as “celle par qui la théorie queer est arrivée en France” (the woman who brought queer theory to France) (Matt)1, in 1996 she set up the first queer forum in France, “le Séminaire du Zoo” (The Zoo Seminar), which until 2000 met regularly in various venues, 91

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both academic (Department of Philosophy, University of Paris I) and associative (Paris’s Centre gai et lesbien in the rue Keller). These meetings were genuine seminars, with set texts and pre-prepared papers, but were open to non-academic participants. “Le Séminaire du Zoo” uncompromisingly asserted political allegiances to queer movements and assiduously cultivated its symbolic outsiderhood via the practices of, inter alia, lesbian sado-masochism, lesbian pornography, fetishism, and transgender people. Bourcier should also be credited with having edited the first published collection of queer interrogations in the French language: Q comme Queer: les séminaires Q (1998).2 This essay examines Bourcier’s engagement with French republicanism /universalism; with colonialism and queer theory; with the body, materiality, and materialism; and with the queerness of her rhetoric. Such foci will shed light on the relationship between one specifically French queer paradigm and the more Anglo-American paradigm that has tended to prevail in other European countries. Although queer theory draws selectively on certain poststructuralist French thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and Lacan, queer practice emerged in American formations such as Queer Nation, and its theoretical foundations have been developed mainly in American universities. Queer theory in France falls prey to an anti-Americanism that is perhaps more common there than in other European countries. In Queer: repenser les identités (2003), Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki provide the following rationale: . . . lorsque l’on prend en considération la lourde charge qui entoure les États-Unis en tant que pays colonisateur du monde, économiquement et surtout culturellement, nous nous trouvons très vite devant un paradoxe: une notion comme queer qui a surgi de luttes socio-politiques véhémentes, donc qui s’oppose de fait à l’Amérique dominante, risque de s’assimiler à la politique d’exportation culturelle américaine. Car il est connu que les États-Unis exportent avec autant de fougue leur culture dominante que leurs contre-cultures. (Klonaris and Thomadaki 84) . . . once we take into consideration the heavy burden surrounding the United States as a colonizer of the world, economically and especially culturally, we quickly find ourselves facing a paradox: a notion like queer which erupted from vehement socio-political struggles, and which thus opposes American dominance, risks being interpreted as part of American cultural exportation. For it is well known that the United States exports its dominant culture with as much ardor as it exports its counter-cultures.

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While Bourcier is both eminently aware of queer theory’s American provenance and vigorously bucks the trend of French anti-Americanism, her very concern to impugn French republicanism /universalism in the name of queer constitutes a French specificity within European queer theorizing. I have chosen to focus on Bourcier not because she is representative of current “queer studies” in France, but rather because of her singularly important work in fostering the emergence of that field, and because of the very visible, voluble, and sometimes vexatious role she now occupies within it.

French Republicanism /Universalism In her Sexpolitiques: queer zones 2 of 2005 (a sequel to Queer zones: politiques des identités sexuelles et des savoirs of 2001), Bourcier provides a brief overview of queer theory in France: L’appropriation de la théorie queer par les groupes français a ses spécificités: tendance anarcho-queer très représentée dans le sud de la France, prises de position épistémo-politiques par rapport aux institutions universitaires et de savoir en général, remise en cause de l’universalisme français et d’une politique et d’une culture élitistes et surplombantes. (131) The appropriation of queer theory by French groups has its specificities: an anarcho-queer tendency amply represented in the south of France, an assumption of epistemo-political positions vis-à-vis university institutions and knowledge in general, a questioning of French universalism and of an overarching elitist politics and culture.

One feature here, the questioning of French universalism, typifies Bourcier’s own approach. In fact, Sexpolitiques: queer zones 2 deploys queer theory not just to question but to systematically arraign French republican universalism. On occasion, her queer analyses border on indiscriminate opposition to all facets of the French state and, more broadly, to European traditions of thought, which she often treats synecdochically as reducible to mere Eurocentrism. Nonetheless, on the whole her use of queer theory against French republican universalism is politically savvy. Queer theory allows her to reveal how that universalism, in confusing respect for the equality of all citizens with refusal to recognize their differences, blinds itself to multiple oppressions: the oppressions not just of those marginalized by their sex / gender / sexual orientation but also those in France who are marginalized by their race/ethnicity due to France’s colonial past and

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its aftermath. Some will strenuously contest the appending of race/ethnicity to the conceptual ambit of queer on the grounds that if queer has any theoretical originality and value it is in its focused attention to issues of sexual orientation and gender. According to this argument, to add race and ethnicity is to downgrade queer to the status of trite synonym for contestation. Bourcier has no truck with such reasoning, and here she is clearly still in the vanguard of queer theorizing in France: For her, issues of race and ethnicity are integral elements of queer theory and praxis. Their inclusion certainly strengthens her impeachment of French republican universalism by swelling the sheer numbers of those patently disenfranchised by that system, and by highlighting the system’s failure both to treat all citizens as equal and to respond to their differing needs. Another facet of Bourcier’s overview of queer theory in France, namely the “prises de position épistémo-politiques par rapport aux institutions universitaires et de savoir en général” (131) (adoption of epistemologicalpolitical positions relative to university institutions and to knowledge in general) also finds ample illustration in Sexpolitiques: queer zones 2, in the suggestively named essay “Cultural studies et politiques de la discipline: talk dirty to me!” Here, Bourcier’s metaphorization of the French Republic is arrestingly apocalyptic. It is presented as a nuclear reactor that can be fissioned by activating marginal politico-cultural theorizations and practices (such as postcolonial studies; feminisms and postfeminism; ethnic studies; gay, lesbian, and trans studies; queer studies; disability studies; beur3 studies, whiteness studies; porn studies; and gender studies [10]). The word-play here generates notions of toxicity but also of the Republic’s reactionary character. Far from presenting such theorizations and practices as progressive trends that could enrich the Republic, Bourcier prefers to anticipate with relish the terror of those still beguiled by grand modernist narratives promising social progress, justice, and equality for all through French republicanism. The fissioning of the republican reactor will, she predicts, explode these mythical narratives and reveal that they actually function to assure “la défense de l’universel blanc masculin hétérosexuel” (10) (the defense of the white masculine heterosexual universal). Such fissioning is a threat to what Bourcier calls the epistemo-political privileges of this hegemonic subject, along with his “casiers disciplinaires et ses universités straight” (disciplinary compartments and his straight universities).4 Within this general context of French academics’ and intellectuals’ resistance to the study of genders and sexualities, what is most striking is the particular resistance of feminists and female academics to gender studies.

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For Bourcier, the reason for what seems like an antinomy is their allegiance to “une certaine idée de la hiérarchie des savoirs et des usages, une politique unitaire, républicaine, hétérocentrée et le sujet qui va avec, pour ne pas dire une certaine idée de la nation face à l’émergence des identités dans le champ politique et dans les médias” (19; my emphasis) (a certain idea of the hierarchy of knowledge forms and usages, a unitary, republican, heterocentered politics and the subject that goes with it, not to say a certain idea of the nation faced with the emergence of identities in the political arena and in the media). Bourcier here implies another avatar of the perennial exception française: In a Europe eager to promote gender studies, the French Ministry for Research is figured as intellectually insular vis-àvis the rest of Europe (19–20), obscurantistly opposed to such studies as a form of identity politics imported from an America perceived as threatening French civilization (20). It is also the specter of Americanization that is posited as the reason for French women academics’ fear of being ghettoized within any new university discipline of feminist studies (21). In what seems like a broadly valid generalization, Bourcier tartly posits the result of French women’s complicity in intellectual isolationism vis-à-vis the rest of Europe: “On aura droit aux ‘études féminines’ de Hélène Cixous à l’université de Paris VIII, preuve s’il en est que la France est le musée de la différence sexuelle et le seul pays européen à avoir re-essentialisé la femme à l’université” (22). (We’ll be treated to Hélène Cixous’s “feminine studies” at the University of Paris VIII, proof if ever there were that France is the museum of sexual difference and the only European country to have re-essentialized women in universities.) French women’s heteronomy, their subordination to the republican universalist myth, and the resulting suppression of female voices (among others) are analogized to the culture of the closet. Rather than a merely apposite metaphor, this constitutes a queering of conceptual boundaries between the public (university discourses) and the private (selfidentity discourses). The sexual universalism of French feminist philosopher Elisabeth Badinter is one of Bourcier’s prime targets. Badinter’s identity as a feminist is disputed by some because of, inter alia, her attack in Fausse route (2003) on French feminists for unfairly blaming French women’s difficulties on French men and for hyperbolizing those difficulties. Ostensibly, the gap between Badinter’s and Bourcier’s feminisms mirrors the Franco-American clash between pro- and anti-universalism. Yet ironically, Badinter’s complaint that certain feminists exaggerate women’s difficulties comes close

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to Bourcier’s later accusation that French feminists nurture a culture of victimhood. Unaware of this paradoxical convergence, Bourcier demarcates herself scathingly from Badinter by claiming that the latter’s essentialist universalism is so allergic to differences it logically leads to a demonstration of how we can and must abolish sexual difference (47). While Bourcier’s castigation of republicanism’s homogenizing force is compelling, she rather muddies the waters by indicting republicanism not just for its logic of the same but also for the very opposite, namely its perceived differentialism: “L’universalisme français est un particularisme qui ne s’affirme pas comme tel” (38) (French universalism is a particularism which doesn’t declare itself as such). “Il ne reste qu’un fantasme d’unicité face aux identités et subcultures qui prolifèrent; la pratique différentialiste républicaine a été outée” (51) (all that’s left is a fantasy of uniqueness faced with the identities and subcultures that are proliferating; the differentialist republican practice has been outed). It is a reasonable contention that the French state can appear both differentialist in recognizing difference and universalist in seeking to suppress that difference, but Bourcier risks neutralizing the two terms by using them in a less than precise manner.

Nuancing Bourcier’s Queer More persuasive is her later explanation that French resistance to claims of difference is based on an unquestioned support for the principle of equality between individuals (154). The reader may wish to ponder the relative merits of the demand for identitarian differentiation from other citizens on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the precept of the equality of all citizens before the law—rather than, like Bourcier, merely dismissing the latter precept as somehow passé, frumpily modernist as opposed to postmodernist. Scott Gunther, writing from a very different perspective relative to Bourcier (that of an American academic with research interests not just in gender and sexuality in France but also in comparative law) makes a vital point about French universalism that Bourcier never considers but which is indispensable to any balanced debate about the French Republic’s treatment of male, if not of female, homosexuality: . . . the universalist vision of French law requires that basic legal principles be applied consistently, without any exceptions. While other legal systems can occasionally accommodate exceptions to their basic legal principles—particularly, when like in the case of sodomy, there is a long tradition of doing so—the universalist aspirations of the French

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republican legal system make this especially difficult. The rigidity of the French republican legal system in this respect has protected French people who engage in same-sex sexual acts from various forms of legal repression . . . (Gunther 2)

The point implicit in Gunther’s words here, that the French republican legal system has actually been to the benefit of gay men, would no doubt fail to impress Bourcier. She treats Bertrand Delanoë, Paris’s openly gay mayor, as having sold out to a male-dominated and homosocially friendly Republic. She reduces him to a mere synecdoche for the French republican state, via sarcastic use of the neologism “homo republicanus,” a play on the two senses of the prefix “homo,” in Latin meaning “man” and in Greek meaning “same,” the latter of which has now become synonymous with “homosexual.” In connection with this “homo republicanus” epitomized by Delanoë, Bourcier makes tendentious claims about the French parity law. Passed on June 6, 2000, this law seeks to promote (but does not guarantee) equal access for women and men to electoral mandates and elective functions:5 Paritaire ou non, l’homo republicanus confond l’égalité arithmétique avec la justice. . . . Derrière la parité, il y a bien une politique de l’identité: celle de la femme hétérocentrée. . . . La parité agitée par les féministes ou les gais de la ville de Paris est une réaffirmation de “l’universalisme de la différence sexuelle” et de l’hétérosexualité. (89–90) Whether he supports parity or not, the homo republicanus confuses arithmetical equality with justice. . . . Behind parity, there is certainly a politics of identity: that of heterocentred women. . . . The question of parity debated by the feminists or the gays in the city of Paris is a reassertion of the “universalism of sexual difference” and of heterosexuality.

The assumption that the parity law is based on a privileging of “la femme hétérocentrée” may well appear erroneous because the law obviously applies to lesbians as well as to straight women. Similarly, the assertion that parity is a reaffirmation of heterosexuality at first sight seems unintelligible. Bourcier is presumably using the word “hétérosexualité” idiosyncratically here, to designate a symbolic order based on the man / woman dichotomy rather than to denote attraction to the opposite sex and the political regime constructed on such attraction. But one wonders why she does not make this idiosyncratic usage clear and thereby obviate the impression of conceptual catachresis. If her objection is to any legislation

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that implicitly or explicitly invokes the binary opposition man /woman, it is difficult to reconcile this objection with her earlier rejection of parity in favor of quotas or positive discrimination: La parité est sans doute l’instrument politico-sexuel le plus grossier, le plus susceptible de faire retour à une vision biologisante des “deux sexes et des deux genres.” . . . Préférée aux quotas et à la discrimination positive qui amèneraient à des calculs plus proches de la réalité historique et culturelle de l’exclusion des femmes du champ politique, la parité débouche sur une réontologisation de la différence sexuelle et du régime sexe /genre /orientation sexuelle dominant, à savoir l’hétérosexualité. (86) Parity is probably the crudest politico-sexual instrument, the most likely to go back to a biologizing vision of the “two sexes and two genders.” . . . Favored over the quotas and positive discrimination that would lead to calculations closer to the historical and cultural reality of women’s exclusion from the political arena, parity leads to a reontologization of sexual difference and of the dominant sex /gender/ sexual orientation regime, namely heterosexuality.

There are two salient points here. First, Bourcier is being deliberately provocative, waving the red flag of quotas and positive discrimination to the bull of the French universalist, and in so doing implying her proAmericanism (since these political practices are historically associated with America). Second, her reasoning is flawed to the extent that quotas or positive discrimination cannot help but invoke the very binary opposition she anathematizes, and also require a state apparatus, in this case the reviled Republic, to enforce them. It would seem that Bourcier’s violent censure of the parity law stems from its focus on the putatively essentializing category of “La Femme” (Woman) to the detriment of other marginalized subjects, such as transgendered people, prostitutes, disabled people, some gay men, lesbians, and “les enfants d’immigrés voilés ou pas” (90) (the children of immigrants whether veiled or not). To give Bourcier her due, this is a richly queer grouping of disparate disadvantaged individuals who form no kind of normative community. Here she stretches, possibly to its very limits, the conceptualization of queer, and certainly for those who insist on the primacy of a sexed or gendered content to queer she goes beyond those limits, simply creating a ragbag of disenfranchised citizens in which one suspects tensions, not to say hostilities, might be rife. For instance, children of immigrants who in France are likely to be Muslim come from a cultural tradition that is hardly tolerant of transgendered people. And

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while her anxieties about the French Republic’s relative disregard for these other disadvantaged demographics is justified, their cause would hardly be furthered by abolition of the parity law. It is also anomalous that, with the exception of “certains gais” (some gay men), all of the marginalized categories she enumerates are either constituted by or include women, whereas she elsewhere pits “Woman” against these other categories. Given the zeal with which she upbraids the parity law, it is strange that Bourcier makes hardly any mention of the Pacs, which is a civil union open to any two individuals of either sex barring blood relatives. After all, the Pacs was another legislative product of the French Republic, introduced in 1999 by the same Parti Socialiste responsible for the parity law. The parity and Pacs laws again exemplify France’s exceptionality, both being firsts within Europe. That said, the Pacs grants neither the same material benefits nor the symbolic consecration offered by gay marriage, which was subsequently legalized in three other European countries: Holland (2001), Belgium (2003), and Spain (2005). And of course, the strong antiassimilationist tendencies of queer theory would not regard either of these laws as progressive. It is within the framework of those tendencies that we should consider Bourcier’s one cynical reference to the Pacs, which reduces it to a grubby little compromise with universalism: “un Pacs nettement moins inquiétant que le mariage mais tellement plus universel” (79) (a Pacs decidedly less worrying than marriage but so much more universal). Fabre and Fassin had made a similar point two years previously, but rather more directly: “les revendications nouvelles (pacs et parité) se disent dans un langage universel: il ne s’agit pas de créer un statut pour les homosexuels, mais un statut indifférencié ouvert à tous les couples” (Fabre and Fassin 33); (the new demands [Pacs and parity] are expressed in a universal language: it’s not about creating a status for homosexuals, but an undifferentiated status open to all couples). Bourcier’s relative silence on the Pacs is all the more curious given Judith Butler’s remarks on it. Even if Butler uses the specific term “queer” rarely, she is probably the most pantheonic figure of queer theory, and certainly one from whom Bourcier had previously drawn inspiration.6 In the following, Butler’s linkages of race and sexuality resonate with those articulated by Bourcier: In the French debates on the PACS . . . the passage of the bill finally depended on proscribing the rights of non-heterosexual couples from adopting children and accessing reproductive technology. . . . one can see that the child figures in the debate as a dense site for the transfer and reproduction of culture, where “culture” carries with it implicit

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norms of racial purity and domination. Indeed, one can see a conversion between the arguments in France that rail against the threat to “culture” posed by the prospect of legally allied gay people having children . . . and those arguments concerning issues of immigration, of what Europe is. This last concern raises the question, implicitly and explicitly, of what is truly French, the basis of its culture, which becomes, through an imperial logic, the basis of culture itself, its universal and invariable conditions. (Undoing Gender 110)

Curiously, Bourcier seems to style herself as a lone scholar here, passing up the opportunity to forge an extra-European, transatlantic link with this foundational queer thinker. One might have expected Butler to be an obvious interlocutor here, given Bourcier’s own delineation of a queer nexus comprising gender, sexuality, race, and nationhood.

Colonialism and Queer Theory Given the importance of these issues in the context of queer Europe, this section focuses on Bourcier’s attempts to queer the French Republic from a postcolonial perspective. That French republicanism is to come under further fire is patent in the very title of Bourcier’s second chapter, “Nique la Rep!” (“Fuck the Republic!”), where she vigorously rebukes the controversial “loi Stasi.” In 2004, following the recommendations of the Stasi Commission, this law was introduced to ban the wearing of all conspicuously religious symbols in French state schools, but has been perceived as targeting particularly, if not exclusively, the Muslim girl’s hijab. Again, France resists European norms, for nowhere else in Europe is there a complete ban on the wearing of the hijab, and only two other countries in Europe even impose any kind of restriction: certain municipalities in Belgium, and eight states in Germany. In connection with the “loi Stasi,” Bourcier quotes (36 –37) from a postcolonialist study, La République coloniale: essai sur une utopie (2003): Quand l’homme indigène résiste, le colon lui fait reproche de manquer à ses devoirs d’homme. Le colon impute sa résistance à une masculinité rétrograde et conservatrice et se fait alors le défenseur des femmes et des enfants indigènes, victimes d’hommes marqués par la violence. Les femmes et les enfants sont des êtres innocents, et le missionnaire républicain doit les protéger. [. . .] la France républicaine ne peut accepter des coutumes d’asservissement des femmes. (Bancel, Blanchard, and Vergès 70 –71)

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When the native man resists, the colonist criticizes him for failing in his duties as a man. The colonist imputes his resistance to a backward or conservative masculinity and so becomes the defender of the indigenous women and children, victims of men marked by violence. Women and children are innocent beings, and the republican missionary must protect them. . . . Republican France cannot accept customs whereby women are enslaved.

By deploying this quotation in her discussion of the “loi Stasi,” Bourcier insinuates that France’s twenty-first-century legislators still largely represent “le colon.” The counterargument would be that twenty-first-century republican France’s intolerance of the “asservissement des femmes” derives from a genuinely ethical, and not merely male, opposition to the bodily inscription of subjugation exemplified by the Muslim woman’s wearing of the hijab. Further, although men outnumbered women in the membership of the Stasi Commission—twelve and six respectively—it is inaccurate to represent it as exclusively male and masculinist given that one-third of the commission’s membership was female. Granted, being female does not automatically entail resistance to the risk of patriarchal benevolence, but it may maximize critical awareness of that risk. Bourcier postulates that the debate on secularism and the passing of a law against the “Islamic headscarf ” reveal the crisis of Republican French identity and of postcolonial France’s sexual politics (37). In early 2010, her postulate of a crisis seemed exaggerated, since expectations that the wearing of the burqa (the full veil) in public would soon be outlawed in France did not materialize. A parliamentary commission opted for a more limited approach, whereby disapproval of the burqa should be expressed by the French parliament without a law actually prohibiting it being passed. One reason for that unexpected decision was apprehension that such a law would have been censured either by France’s own Constitutional Council or by the European Court of Human Rights. However, by June 2010, the situation had changed fairly dramatically: No doubt inspired by Belgium’s subsequent successful introduction of a ban on the burqa in public places, French parliamentarians are re-opening the case for such a ban in France. According to Bourcier writing some five years earlier, the putative crisis of French Republican identity and the sexual politics of postcolonial France had been crystallized around the Muslim woman. It is interesting that she blames this state of affairs not on the Republican France she is usually so quick to lambast, but rather on the movement of rationalist modernity in Europe more generally. One particularly contentious point

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is Bourcier’s suggestion that feminists who oppose veiling have failed to examine the colonial presuppositions of their emancipatory discourse (39). I believe it is a form of discursive totalitarianism to brand feminists who denounce the very real oppression of women in Islamic states, if not in the Koran itself, and who have deep reservations about the imposition of a hijab, with colonialism. Such branding is a performative (speech-) act, which silences the Western feminist, effectively gagging her with the threat of being stigmatized as racist, even though gender and race are transversal lines that intersect and impact each other—a point Bourcier herself accepts in her own methodologies. That drift toward discursive totalitarianism also characterizes Bourcier’s dismissal of the association Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissives). NPNS combats violence against women and gendered discrimination, and supports working-class mothers, particularly those of immigrant origin living in France’s banlieues. Given this profile, Bourcier’s charge that NPNS is antifeminist (76) seems counterintuitive, even if we concede that feminism is hardly free from factionalism. Her main objection to NPNS relates to its perceived essentialism and neglect of other axes of identity such as class and race, which construct the aggregate of a female subject (76). I have previously acknowledged that being female does not immunize one against patriarchal identifications. Similarly, I acknowledge that being of immigrant origin does not immunize one against racism any more than being of working-class origin guarantees a socialist political stance. However, lived experience of racial and class oppression will, on the whole, heighten the awareness of such oppression that is the prerequisite to fighting it. With that proviso, it seems not nugatory that NPNS’s current president Sihem Habchi is of Algerian origin, nor that, as John Bowen comments, “most of the visible leaders of the movement were children of North African immigrants” (215), to which we should add the observation that most North African immigrants to France would be categorized as working-class. At the time of Sexpolitiques: queer zones 2’s publication, the NPNS’s President was Fadela Amara, who is also of Algerian origin, and who at that point had not yet joined François Fillon’s rightwing government dominated by the UMP (Union Pour un Mouvement Populaire), as she was to do in 2007. Some readers unaware of the latter point might have assumed that Bourcier’s hostility to Amara’s movement derived from Amara’s status as a right-wing minister. In fact, Bourcier reserves far more venom for the left-wing opposition PS (Parti Socialiste) than for the right-wing UMP,7 and has more recently slated NPNS as an association manufactured by the PS (“La démocratie performative” 2007).

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But a cognitive slippage seems to be set in motion by Bourcier’s diatribe, at the end of which she comes to the perverse conclusion that NPNS partakes of a colonial attitude (76). As a coda to this analysis, note that a colonialist mentality is ascribed by Bourcier not just to NPNS feminists but also to French materialist feminists: Ainsi a-t-on pu passer, dans le courant féministe matérialiste français notamment, de la domination sexiste à l’esclavage pour parler de la prostitution, sans interroger les présupposés coloniaux d’un tel glissement et le fait que celui-ci s’est traduit par un effacement de la question du racisme chez les féministes et par une totale absence de féministes de couleur aux postes théoriques. (127–28) So a passage became possible, notably in the French feminist materialist current, from sexist domination to slavery in talking about prostitution, with no examination of the colonialist presuppositions of such a slide or of the fact that the latter resulted in feminists ignoring the question of racism and also in a total absence of feminists of color dealing with theory.

As it often is, with Bourcier on the offensive, the charge seems inflated. It is well established that European second-wave feminism in general was, at least in its inception, dominated by white, middle-class women. But it did not operate a deliberate policy of racist exclusion, and more importantly, that domination has been considerably reduced since the 1970s. Further, Bourcier ignores the role of another identitarian category whose importance she has previously (76) emphasized, that of class: the fact that working-class women have not tended to position themselves in the vanguard of feminist theorizing and publishing, and that most French women of immigrant origin have also been working-class. Consideration of class leads into the fourth section, which focuses on materialism, along with the body and materiality.

The Body, Materiality, and Materialism Bourcier’s perverse conclusion on NPNS is followed by an assertion of similarly wayward (queer?) logic: Les féministes, lesbiennes féministes comprises, en guerre contre le viol et l’objectivisation du corps de la femme dans la publicité et dans les “caves,” mais qui ne parlent jamais de sexualité positive, feraient bien de

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s’interroger sur le fait qu’elles réussissent mieux que les antiféministes de gauche comme de droite à construire un trou ontologique, une subjectivité “féminine” radicalement vide et passive, mâtinée d’une bonne conscience—la leur— d’aide aux victimes. (76) Feminists, including lesbian feminists, who wage war against rape and the objectivization of women’s bodies in advertizing and in “clubs,” but who never talk about positive sexuality, would do well to wonder about the fact that they are more successful than both right-wing and left-wing antifeminists in constructing an ontological hole, a “female” subjectivity which is radically empty and passive, mixed with a good conscience—their own—about helping victims.

The short shrift given by Bourcier here to the politics of gendered embodiment is particularly inapposite in view of her later, valid objection that in many analyses of sexual identities inspired by feminist or post-feminist theory, including queer theory, “il arrive souvent que l’on finisse par faire l’économie du corps” (232); (it often happens that the body is ultimately dispensed with). Yes, sex is partially a discursive construction, an effect of discourse, but, as opposed to gender, it is also a materiality. Marxist theoreticians might nuance this by positing gender as a signifier and arguing for the materiality of the signifier. However, it seems to me that this confuses the material results a signifier can have with the nature of the signifier itself. By “materiality” I refer to the irreducible physicality of the anatomically sexed body, as opposed to gender, which exists only through representation. Leaving aside the minority of anatomically borderline individuals referred to as intersex, it is undeniable that anatomically female bodies are vulnerable to the usually greater physical strength of anatomically male bodies. This is most soberingly evident in the far higher risk run by women as opposed to men of being beaten (in situations of so-called domestic abuse) or raped, and in their subjection to FGM (female genital mutilation). Thus, while the poststructuralist subject who is the “implied reader” of queer theorizations may justly wish to respect the latter’s implicit ukase against any hint of naïve essentialism, s/he would be acting in bad faith completely to jettison the category “women” as an ethico-political stake.8 In saying this, I am not committing the cardinal sin of renaturalizing “woman”: I am, rather, refusing to erase brute facts about powers of life or death held by the majority of men over the majority of women. Franco-Canadian lesbian feminist Danielle Charest may overstate the case in saying that queer evades “des contrées de l’oppression, celle-ci sans doute trop ‘bassement’ rattachée à la réalité concrète, palpable et sa

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cohorte d’horreurs vécues par les femmes et les lesbiennes sur la totalité de la planète” (Charest 94) (lands of oppression, no doubt too “basely” connected to concrete, palpable reality and its host of horrors experienced by women and lesbians all over the planet). But to trivialize concern for women’s physical safety as perpetuating a culture of victimization is something of an insult to the millions of women who have been or are being victimized daily, hardly through choice. Admittedly, such trivialization does not delegitimize Bourcier’s claim (however typically excessive the use of “jamais”) that “Les féministes, lesbiennes féministes comprises . . . ne parlent jamais de sexualité positive” (76) (feminists, including lesbian feminists . . . never talk about a positive form of sexuality). But it remains unclear how concern for women’s physical safety and bodily integrity, how opposition to rape and physical violence against women, spawn the construction of an ontological hole or a radically empty and passive feminine subjectivity. A culture of victimhood is also a charge Bourcier levels against the majority of lesbians, gays, and transgendered people in France: La grande majorité des gais, des lesbiennes et des trans sont hyperrépublicains, en recherche d’hyperintégration. Il n’est que de voir comment la politique assimilationniste est menée par l’Interlgbt (l’interassociative fidèle du PS qui organise la marche des fiertés en juin); comment l’activisme est relégué aux oubliettes au profit de visions victimisantes et psychologisantes des discriminations . . . (79) The vast majority of gays, lesbians and trans people are hyperrepublican and want to be hyper-integrated. You just have to see how the assimilationist policy is implemented by the Interlgbt (the federation of associations faithful to the Socialist Party which organizes the pride marches in June); how activism is relegated to oblivion in favor of victimizing and psychologizing visions of discrimination . . .

The argument that combating discrimination against non-heterosexual individuals does not constitute activism (“l’activisme est relégué aux oubliettes”) remains hard to sustain. Much later on, she refers to “le discours de victimisation auquel se limite le mouvement gai officiel” (243) (the discourse of victimization to which the official gay movement restricts itself ). In January 2004, Sébastien Nouchet was the victim of a brutal homophobic attack in the Pas-de-Calais region of France. Suffering from third-degree burns, he lay in a coma for two weeks.9 The subsequent public shock and anti-homophobic campaigning led to the introduction of a law in December 2004 that outlaws defamation and insults based on an

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individual’s sexual orientation, sex, or handicap. Despite the atrocious assault on Nouchet’s bodily integrity and the countless other assaults for which it became the grim symbol, Bourcier implies that the official gay movement’s purported fixation on equal human rights with heterosexuals is misguided: “Il est illusoire de penser que la lutte contre l’homophobie, la lesbophobie et la transphobie passe, avant comme après l’agression de Sébatien [sic] Nouchet, par l’égalité des droits” (243) (it’s illusory to think that the fight against homophobia, lesbophobia and transphobia, before and after the attack on Sébatien [sic] Nouchet, must involve equal rights). But the logical corollary of her argument is a renunciation of lobbying for civil rights and legislative change, in favor of queer resignifications of gender norms—“les butch (les soft et les stone), les drag king, les drag queen, les folles, les Radical Fairies, les bears, les SM, les human pets, qui sont autant de recodifications des normes de genre” (243– 44) (butches [soft and hard-core], drag kings, drag queens, poofters, Radical Fairies, bears, SMs, human pets: so many recodifications of gender norms). My point is that there should surely be room for both forms of politics (to recapitulate, a politics that aims to improve LGBQT civil rights through legislative change, and a more diffuse, everyday politics of queer resignifications of gender norms), and that to renounce the struggle for equal legal rights in the form of combating homophobia is perilously ingenuous. There is a marked inconsistency between Bourcier’s rejection of focus on discrimination and victimization here and her instrumentalization of them elsewhere in order to denigrate the openly gay mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, who was precisely the victim of another brutal homophobic attack in 2002: “la stratégie de communication du maire après son aggression a été claire: il a choisi l’identification avec ‘des représentants politiques de plus en plus exposés’— comme les élus municipaux de Nanterre—plutôt qu’avec des homos assassinés sur les lieux de drague par les casseurs de pédés” (the mayor’s communication strategy after the attack on him was clear: he chose identification with “political representatives increasingly in the public eye”—like the municipal councilors of Nanterre—rather than gays murdered in cruising areas by gay bashers).10 The fact that Delanoë, having publicly condemned this attempt on his life, chose thereafter not to dwell on, mediatize, or exploit it might be criticized by some as a missed opportunity to impress upon the French nation the reality and gravity of homophobia. On the other hand, he could hardly be accused of having hushed the matter up, and it could be ventured that his resilience in getting on with his job as mayor of Paris and not adopting the role of cowed victim in fact cocked a powerfully deflating snook at homophobes.

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In the concluding part of this fourth section, I would like to return to its starting-point of materialism. It is ironic that Bourcier neglects the axis of class in her critique of radical materialist feminism, since any Marxistinformed thought is obviously undergirded by concepts of class and class conflict. My assumption that she is using “materialist” synonymously with “Marxist” is based on her reference to “l’approche marxiste/matérialiste” (135). But Bourcier does not acknowledge the very different approaches to the body taken by materialism in Marxism and post-Butler materialism. Marxist materialism includes, but goes far beyond, the body, to study the link between class and other categories. After the work of Butler, materialism has come to mean a focus on the materiality of the body. According to Bourcier, radical materialist feminism’s mistrust of queer is based on queer’s perceived obsession with sex and on a corresponding political levity supposedly linked to a craze for the model of gender as performance and performativity (133). Referring to the work of feminist anthropologist Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Bourcier summarizes the reservations of materialist feminists about queer: Cette assimilation de la performance au registre “purement” métaphorique permet de redessiner une opposition binaire favorable à l’approche marxiste/ matérialiste. D’un côté, la réalité, la matérialité et l’oppression concrète, les rapports sociaux de sexe dont se préoccupe le féminisme matérialiste et de l’autre, l’imaginaire / le symbolique, les représentations, le “gender” l’abstrait, le flou dont “le queer” ferait ses choux gras . . . (135) This assimilation of performance to the register of the “purely” metaphorical allows a redesigning of a binary opposition favorable to the Marxist /materialist approach. On the one hand, reality, materiality and concrete oppression, the social relations of sex with which materialist feminism is concerned and on the other hand, the imaginary / the symbolic, representations, “gender,” abstraction, a haziness on which “queer” would capitalize . . .

Later on, conceptual clarity is attenuated when Bourcier again has recourse to the word “hétérocentrique” to qualify feminist emphasis on the material oppression of women. Bourcier seems to take the mere fact of this perfectly legitimate, indeed I would say vital, emphasis as a license to make accusations of heterocentric adherence to the straight binary sex / gender system (138). Such accusations are ill-judged, for there is a significant difference between recognizing the bodily oppression of the category of female human beings on the one hand, and, on the other hand,

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subscribing to heterocentrism or making a fetish out of the difference between men and women (which is what Bourcier seems to mean here by “heterocentrism”). Much more cogent is Bourcier’s approach to materialist feminists’ rejection of sexuality as a political imperative. It is indisputable that a certain old-style feminism sometimes manifests a form of sexual puritanism, whereby sex is conceived as an essentially masculine activity or concern (138). For some of these old-style feminists, such a negative attitude to sex forecloses the possibility of queer alliances between lesbians and gay men: “Le sexe serait l’obsession de cette catégorie d’hommes dominants que sont les homosexuels, dont il faut d’ailleurs se débarrasser, tout comme des stratégies coalitionnistes queer réunissant des gais et des lesbiennes” (138) (sex is allegedly the obsession of that category of dominant men formed by homosexuals, of whom we must rid ourselves, along with queer coalitionist strategies bringing gays and lesbians together). This is a long-standing obstacle to the political cooperation of lesbians and gays. Lesbians of the first French gay liberation group, the FHAR (Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire, or Homosexual front for revolutionary action) of 1971, eventually protested to their “frères homesexuels” (homosexual brothers) against what they saw as a male idolization of sex: “Nous, lesbiennes, nous voulons parler de notre amour, car nous en avons assez de voir l’homme étaler le sexe et lui seul” (“Réponse des lesbiennes” 81) (we lesbians want to talk about our love, because we’ve had enough of seeing men making a show of sex and sex alone). Bourcier effectively highlights the dual difficulties faced by the lesbian movement in France: marginalization as lesbians by the women’s movement (MLF: Mouvement de libération des femmes), and marginalization by the gay male movement as women. Michèle Causse, a representative of second-wave lesbian feminism, still harbored such reservations in 1996, averring that: [pour la lesbica post-moderna] Le mot “politique,” quand il est encore employé, n’a plus pour référent la lutte contre la domination des femmes par les hommes. Le patriarcat est de nouveau un donné. Que l’industrie du sexe déshumanise les femmes n’est plus un souci majeur. Le mot clé est désir. Il s’agit d’é/gay/er le corps. Evidemment sur le mode que propagent les homos mâles. (Causse 67) [for the postmodern lesbian] The word “political,” when it’s still used, no longer refers to the fight against male domination of women. Patriarchy is once more taken as a given. That the sex industry should dehumanize women is no longer a major worry. The key word is desire:

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you have to cheer and queer the body. Using methods promoted by gay men, of course.

Nikki Sullivan underscores one of the reasons for many old-style feminists’ skepticism about queer theory: “Queer Theory and/or activism has been accused of being, among other things, male-centred, anti-feminist . . .” (Sullivan 48). This stereotype has held particular sway in France, leading to what could be regarded as an ill-informed rejection by many French feminists of a queer theory whose textual articulations they have not even read. Yet Suzanna Danuta Walters’s question at the end of the following reflections is still worth pondering: “Queer theory, particularly in its more academic manifestations, is often posed as a response to a certain kind of feminist and lesbian theorizing that is now deemed hopelessly retro, boring, realist, modernist, about shoring up identity rather than its deconstruction. . . . Is it possible that queer theory’s unspoken Other is feminism, or even lesbianism, or lesbian-feminism?” (Walters 11). Although there are sufficiently common grounds here for Sullivan’s and Walters’s contributions to be helpful, they are located in an Anglophone context which needs to be distinguished from the French.11 As indicated, queer is a far less familiar concept for French intellectuals than their American counterparts, and the general conditions for queer’s reception in France are hardly favorable, given the Republic’s reluctance to mix politics with putatively private issues such as the citizen’s sexuality. Bourcier, however, does not examine these considerations, preferring to draw attention to what she views as a closeting of the lesbian even within the radical lesbian movement. To her mind, that movement has in France been obsessed to the detriment of lesbians by the alienation of heterosexual women (143). Yet the postulate of the radical materialist lesbian journal Amazones d’hier et lesbiennes aujourd’hui cited by Bourcier (143), “L’hétérosexualité: un régime politique dans lequel aucun rapport sexuel ne peut être libre pour les femmes” (Turcotte 121) (Heterosexuality: a political regime in which no sexual relationship can be free for women), should surely not be thrown out of court, as it is by Bourcier, simply because it posits “la femme, certes en tant que catégorie sociale, mais reconnaissable biologiquement in fine” (143) (woman, admittedly as a social category, but biologically recognizable in fine). What is more important, as Bourcier herself occasionally concedes, is the construction of “women” as a social category that needs to be deconstructed, certainly, but which we still cannot afford simply to elide. It is difficult to fathom Bourcier’s apparent disdain for the ultimate goal of the radical materialist lesbian movement,

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viz. the abolition of heterosexuality as a political regime. Perhaps this disdain lies in awareness of the fact that such abolition would provisionally require intensive engagement with heterosexual women and men, and that “provisionally” might actually cover a rather long, not to say interminable, time period. The problem is that Bourcier offers no such explanations, leaving the reader to fill in the conceptual blanks of her argument. This refusal to disambiguate could be seen as symptomatic of a rigorous refusal to follow through the premises of her arguments to their logical conclusions. More positively, it could be regarded as a deliberate queering of the norms of argumentation and rhetoric. This formal phenomenon forms the subject of the next section.

Linguistic Queering Bourcier’s diglossic writing style mirrors her inside/out positioning: inside the academy in her tenure of a university lectureship, outside in her contempt for its institutions and norms. Often extremely arcane, adroitly manipulating high theory, it also makes strategic raids into a boldly iconoclastic, populist, sometimes even vulgar register—witness “Nique la Rep!” (Fuck the Republic!) and “Nique ton genre!” (Fuck your gender!)—which is at the antipodes of standard French academic writing. Her writing style also makes abundant use of anglicisms, which again pit her against the anti-Americanism common in French culture, as well as transgressing the recommendations of the French linguistic legislators collectively known as the “Académie Française.” Interestingly, the anglicism “trash” was used to qualify her writing style in the dust jacket copy of Sexpolitiques: queer zones 2. Consonant with the hype that characterizes much promotional copy, the word “trash” has no injurious intent here; for here, it signifies transgressive hipness. And as befits Bourcier’s diglossic style, mirroring its unification of apparent opposites, “trash” is collocated with the adjective “érudit”: “le style trash et érudit qu’on lui connaît” (the trashy and erudite style, which is her trademark). Further, her texts revel in a denaturalizing and subversion of normative language usage. This includes mordant word play; abundant neologism, which is often based on academic franglais, but is sometimes piquantly autochthonous—for instance, “chattologique” (164), which combines “chatte” meaning “cunt” and “ologique” meaning “ological”; and sardonic nominative allusion, as in “Dominator” to designate and denigrate France’s celebrated sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. The insult “Dominator” alludes both to Bourdieu’s La Domination masculine (1998)

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and to the indignant perception of many feminists, including Bourcier, that far from critiquing this eponymous masculine domination, the fêted Bourdieu was actually complicit in it. Bourcier’s use of a form of rhetorical inflation, of which many examples have been adduced here, could be applauded as a form of discursive camp. But rhetorical inflation is hardly alien to traditional French discursivity. Further, Bourcier’s exaggerations sometimes threaten to neutralize the impact of her contiguous points that are less caricatural, indeed often very powerful. Let us take one representative example. Ventriloquizing the French Ministry for Research, Bourcier caricatures French anti-Americanism as exploiting the old chestnut of American imperialism to block the development of gender studies: “Le genre . . . est un truc anglo-saxon. Entendez et tremblez: un effet de l’impérialisme américain” (20) (gender . . . is an Anglo-Saxon thing. Hear and tremble: an effect of American imperialism). Bourcier burlesques this resistance in “la catégorie de ‘genre,’ diabolisée comme un McDonald’s” (20) (the category of “gender,” diabolized like a McDonald’s). This ostentatious raid into the register of “trash” in an otherwise “érudit” text certainly has impact—shock-effect and/or humor—but one wonders precisely which kind of reader Bourcier assumes here. She is either preaching to the converted, or consciously alienating the establishment figures whose reconsideration of their automatic biases would be necessary to any productive change. It is clear that Bourcier defies certain exclusionary conventions of academic writing, attempting to bridge a gap between academic discourse and the grassroots activism that has always been the aim, if not always the reality, of queer theory. In addition, the mercurial qualities of her style do reflect the anti-essentializing, destabilizing aims of queer, representing a transitivity that is metonymically related to the gender/sexual transitivity promoted by queer. All of this makes reading her a rich and challenging experience. Set against these positive qualities are a number of opacities, which I have attempted to identify in the previous section: a vacillation between identity and post-identity arguments, a problematic understanding of materialism, and an apparent disregard for the embodied character of oppressions based on gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.

Conclusion This essay began by asserting queer’s complex relationship with the political. Bourcier marshals queer to further her political aim of undermin-

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ing the French Republic and its biases toward the universal white male heterosexual subject. Some would protest that her marshalling produces a constative dimorphism, which manicheanly valorizes the transformative potential of (Anglo-American) queer theory and vilifies the (perceived) conservatism of the universalist French Republic. One ontology of queer is of a deconstructive practice, with deconstruction meaning the problematization and, provisionally, the reversal of binary oppositions: as Derrida states, “Déconstruire l’opposition, c’est d’abord, à un moment donné, renverser la hiérarchie” (Derrida 57) (to deconstruct the opposition is first of all, at a given moment, to reverse the hierarchy). Bourcier sometimes seems merely to reverse rather than to problematize the hierarchy in her mediation of two different phenomena, (Anglo-American) queer theory and the French Republic. Her antipathy for that Republic’s legislative initiatives, in particular the parity and Pacs laws, can seem churlish, based as it is purely on the institutional origin of such initiatives. Would Bourcier really wish to see these laws abrogated simply because they have come from “inside” rather than “out”? Is her desire for constant and radical oppositionality not ultimately something of a handicap for France’s sexual, gendered, and ethnic minorities? One thinker with whom she might have entered into fruitful dialogue is Maxime Foerster, who two years before Sexpolitiques: Queer Zones 2 had elaborated a parallax vis-à-vis French republican universalism: La République, telle qu’elle se fonde à partir de la Révolution française, devient le régime politique le plus queer qui puisse exister: le concept d’universalisme est une vision désincarnée du citoyen, la réduction de ce dernier à l’abstraction d’un sujet qu’aucune discrimination ne peut pénaliser en raison de son abstraction même. L’universalisme pense le citoyen dans l’indifférence vis-à-vis de ce qu’il est pour lui assurer l’égalité devant la loi. L’indifférence inhérente à l’universalisme n’est pas la négation de la différence mais le souci que cette dernière ne soit jamais le support de la discrimination . . . (Foerster 11) The Republic, such as it was founded from the French Revolution onwards, became the queerest political regime possible: the concept of universalism is a disincarnated vision of the citizen, the reduction of the latter to the abstraction of a subject that no discrimination can penalize because of his very abstraction. Universalism conceives of the citizen in terms of a lack of difference with respect to what he is in order to guarantee him equality before the law. The refusal to differentiate, which is inherent to universalism is not the negation of difference but the concern that the latter should never be the prop of discrimination . . .

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Bourcier would presumably see this as unrealized ideal rather than current Republican praxis. And this ideal’s future entelechy looks increasingly unlikely in the context of a European Union which, since 2000, has had anti-discrimination legislation that axiomatically recognizes differences among its diverse citizens, be those differences of sex, sexuality, race/ ethnicity, religious belief, dis/ability, or age. While the institutions of the European Union may not be quite ready to embrace the multiculturalist model of the United States, they view it with a good deal less suspicion than Republican France. France’s historic insistence on l’exception française in numerous domains has constituted a form of queerness in itself. But a severe tempering of that exceptional queerness may be the price exacted for her continued prominence within the European Union.

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Sick Man of Transl-Asia: Bruce Lee and Queer Cultural Translation Paul Bowman Jîng Wuˇ Student: “Look here! Now, just what is the point of this?” Translator: “Just that the Chinese are a race of weaklings, no comparison to us Japanese.” —Fist of Fury, dubbed version

Jîng Wuˇ Student: “One question, are you Chinese?” Translator: “Yes, but even though we are of the same kind, our paths in life are vastly different.” —Fist of Fury, subtitled version

Woˇ wèn nıˇ, nıˇ shì Zhông guó rén ma ? Woˇ men de zuˇ zông shì—yang de, dàn shì mìng yùn què tiân chà di bié . . . rén bıˇ rén bıˇ sıˇ rén ! —Fist of Fury, transliteration of cantonese audio

“我问你,你是中国人吗？” “我们的祖宗是一样的,但是命运却天差地别 . . . 人比人比死人！” —Fist of Fury, transcription of cantonese audio1

Different Lee Bruce Lee has always been construed as a figure that existed at various crossroads—a kind of chiasmatic figure, into which much was condensed and displaced. His films, even though they are in a sense relatively juvenile action flicks, have also been regarded as spanning the borders and bridging the gaps between “trivial” popular culture and “politicized” cultural movements (Brown; Morris; Prashad; Kato). That is, although on the one hand, they are all little more than fantastic choreographies of aestheticized masculinist vio117

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lence, on the other, they worked to produce politicized identifications and modes of subjectivation that supplemented many popular cultural– political movements: his striking(ly) nonwhite face and unquestionable physical supremacy in the face of often white, always colonialist and imperialist bad guys became a symbol of and for multiple ethnic, diasporic, civil rights, anti-racist, and postcolonial cultural movements across the globe (Prashad; Kato). Both within and “around” his films—that is, both in terms of their internal textual features and in terms of the “effects” of his texts on certain viewing constituencies—it is possible to trace a movement from ethno-nationalism to a post-national, decolonizing, multicultural imaginary (Hunt). This is why his films have been considered in terms of the interfaces and interplays of popular culture, postcolonial, postmodern, and multiculturalist issues that they have been deemed to “reflect,” engage, dramatize, explore, or develop (Abbas; Hunt; Teo). Lee has been credited with transforming intra- and inter-ethnic identification, cultural capital, and cultural fantasies in global popular culture, and in particular as having been central to revising the discursive constitutions and hierarchies of Eastern and Western models of masculinity (Thomas; Chan; Miller; Hunt; Preston). In the wake of such well-known and well-worn approaches to Lee, I propose to take these types of arguments as already read, and prefer to approach Bruce Lee somewhat differently—maybe peculiarly, perhaps even queerly. Specifically, I would like to propose that Bruce Lee’s celluloid cinematic interventions—no matter how fantastic and fabulous— ought to be approached as texts and contexts of cultural translation (Chow, Primitive). However, to say this, a rather twisted or indeed “queer” notion of translation needs to be established. For to speak of cultural translation is not to simply refer to translation in a linguistic or hermeneutic sense. It is rather to be understood as something less “literal” (or logocentric), as what Rey Chow calls “an activity, a transportation between two ‘media,’ two kinds of already-mediated data” (Chow, Primitive 193). Furthermore, cultural translation would also be understood as a range of processes, which means that, for academics, “the ‘translation’ is often what we must work with because, for one reason or another, the ‘original’ as such is unavailable—lost, cryptic, already heavily mediated, already heavily translated” (193). This is not a particularly unusual situation, of course. It is, rather, everyday. Such translated, mediated, commodified, technologized exchanges between cultures happen every day. This is also the situation we are in when encountering film, especially films that are dubbed or subtitled, of course, as in the case of Bruce Lee’s Hong Kong–produced films. Such films are translated, dubbed, and subtitled. But, this is not the start or end of transla-

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tion, for the notion of “cultural translation” demands that we extend our attention beyond the scripts and into the matter of the very medium of film itself, the relations between films, between film and other media, and so on. This is important to emphasize because, despite its everydayness, despite its reality, and despite the arguable primacy of the situation of cultural translation between “translations” with no (access to any) original, this situation of cultural translation is not often accorded the status it could be said to deserve. It is rather more likely to be disparaged by scholars, insofar as it occurs predominantly in the so-called “realms” of popular culture and does not conform to a model of translation organized by the binary of “primary/original” and “derived/copy” (Chow, Primitive 182).

Complex Lee As Chow emphasizes, “the problems of cross-cultural exchange— especially in regard to the commodified, technologized image—in the postcolonial, postmodern age” (182) demand an approach that moves beyond many traditional approaches. For instance, she points out that in addition to the “literal” matters of translation that arise within film, “there are at least two [other] types of translation at work in cinema” (182). The first involves translation understood “as inscription”: any film is a kind of writing into existence of something that was not there as such or in anything like that way, before its constitution in film. The second type of translation associated with film, proposes Chow, involves understanding translation “as transformation of tradition and change between media” (182). In this second sense, film is translation insofar as it is a putative entity (she suggests, “a generation, a nation, [or] a culture” are “translated or permuted into the medium of film”) (182). So, film as such can be regarded as a kind of epochal translation, in the sense that cultures “oriented around the written text” were and continue to be “in the process of transition and of being translated into one dominated by the image” (182): [T]he translation between cultures is never West translating East or East translating West in terms of verbal languages alone but rather a process that encompasses an entire range of activities, including the change from tradition to modernity, from literature to visuality, from elite scholastic culture to mass culture, from the native to the foreign and back, and so forth. (192)

It is here that Bruce Lee should be placed. However, given the complexity of this “place”—this relation or these relations—it seems likely

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that any translation, or indeed any knowledge we hope might be attained, cannot henceforth be understood as simple unity-to-unity transport. This is not least because the relations and connections between Bruce Lee and—well—anything else, will now come to seem always shifting, immanent, virtual, open-ended, ongoing, and uncertain, so much so that the very notions of completeness, totality, or completion are what become unclear or incomplete in the wake of “cultural translation.” In other words, this realization of the complexity of cultural relations, articulations, and encounters jeopardizes traditional, established notions of translation and knowledge-establishment. Yet it does not “reject” them or “retreat” from them. Rather, it transforms them.2 To elucidate this transformation, Chow retraces Foucault’s analyses and argument in The Order of Things (1970) in order to argue that both translation and knowledge per se must henceforth be understood as “a matter of tracking the broken lines, shapes, and patterns that may have become occluded, gone underground, or taken flight” (Chow, Age 81).3 Referring to Foucault’s genealogical work on the history of knowledge epistemes in The Order of Things, Chow notes Foucault’s contention that “the premodern ways of knowledge production, with their key mechanism of cumulative (and inexhaustible) inclusion, came to an end in modern times” (81). The consequence of this has been that “the spatial logic of the grid” has given way “to an archaeological network wherein the once assumed clear continuities (and unities) among differentiated knowledge items are displaced onto fissures, mutations, and subterranean genealogies, the totality of which can never again be mapped out in taxonomic certitude and coherence” (81). As such, any “comparison” must henceforth become “an act that, because it is inseparable from history, would have to remain speculative rather than conclusive, and ready to subject itself periodically to revamped semiotic relations” (81). This is so because “the violent yoking together of disparate things has become inevitable in modern and postmodern times” (81). As such, even an act of “comparison would also be an unfinalizable event because its meanings have to be repeatedly negotiated” (81). This situation arises “not merely on the basis of the constantly increasing quantity of materials involved but more importantly on the basis of the partialities, anachronisms, and disappearances that have been inscribed over time on such materials” seemingly positivistic existences” (81). To call this “queer” may seem to be stretching— or twisting, contorting—things a bit. Clearly, such a translation can be said to be queer only when “queer” is understood in an etymological or associative sense, rather than a sexual one. Nevertheless, it strikes me that the most important im-

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pulse of queer studies was its initial and initializing ethico-political investment in stretching, twisting, and contorting—with the aim of transforming— contingent, biased, and partial societal and cultural norms.4 This is an element of queering that deserves to be reiterated, perhaps over and above queer studies’ “always-possibly socially ‘conservative’ investment in sexuality as such” (Chambers and O’Rourke). This is only so if queering has an interest in transforming a terrain or a context rather than just establishing a local, individual enclave for new norms to be laid down. I believe that it does, which is one of the reasons that it seems worthwhile to draw a relation between cultural translation and queering, given their shared investments in “crossing over,” change, twisting, turning, and warping. Given the undisputed and ongoing importance of Bruce Lee within or across the circuits of global popular culture, crossing from East to West and back again, as well as from film to fantasy to physicality, and other such shifting circuits, it seems worthwhile to consider the status of “crossing over” in (and around) Bruce Lee films.

Excessive Lee To bring such a complicated theoretical apparatus to bear on Bruce Lee films may seem excessive. This will be especially so because, as Kwai Cheung Lo argues, most dubbed and subtitled martial arts films from Hong Kong, China, or Japan have traditionally been approached not with sophisticated cultural theories but with buckets of popcorn and crates of beer, as they have overwhelmingly been treated as a source of cheap laughs for Westerners (Lo 48–54). Indeed, as Leon Hunt has noted, what is “loved” in the “Asiaphilia” of kung fu film fans is mainly “mindlessness”—the mindless violence of martial arts. Like Lo, Hunt suggests that therefore even the Asiaphilia of Westerners interested in Eastern martial arts “subtly” amounts to yet another kind of orientalist “encounter marked by conquest and appropriation” (Hunt 12). Lo’s argument has an extra dimension, however, in that in addition to focusing on the reception of these filmic texts in different linguistic and cultural contexts, he also draws attention to the realm of production. Yet even this, in Lo’s terms, is far from theoretically complex. In Hong Kong film, he writes, “[T]he process of subtitling often draws attention to itself, if only because of its tendency toward incompetence” (Lo 2005: 48). Nevertheless, he suggests, “[A]s a specific form of making sense of things in cross-cultural and cross-linguistic encounters, subtitling reveals realities of cultural domination and subordination and serves as a site of ideological

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dissemination and its subversion” (46).5 For Lo, then, despite a base level of material “simplicity” here, complex issues of translation do arise, and not simply with the Western reception of Eastern texts, but actually at the site of production itself, no matter how slapdash. As he sees it: “Unlike film industries that put a great deal of care into subtitles, Hong Kong cinema is famous for its slipshod English subtitling. The subtitlers of Hong Kong films, who are typically not well educated, are paid poorly and must translate an entire film in two or three days” (53). At the point of reception or consumption, Lo claims, the “English subtitles in Hong Kong film often appear excessive and intrusive to the Western viewer” (49). Drawing on a broad range of Lacano–Zˇizˇekian cultural theory, Lo suggests that the subtitles are “stains” and that: “Just as stains on the screen affect the visual experience, subtitles undermine the primacy and immediacy of the voice and alienate the aural from the visual” (49). In this way, by using one of Zˇizˇek’s favorite double-entendres—the cryptosmutty, connotatively “dirty” word “stain” (a word that, for Zˇizˇek, often signals the presence or workings of “the real” itself )—and by combining it with a broadly Derridean observation about the interruption of the self-presence of auto-affection in the frustration of cinematic identification caused by non-synchronized image-and-voice and image-and-writtenword, Lo crafts an argument that is all about excess. The subtitles are excess. Their meaning is excess: an excess of sameness for bilingual viewers, and an excess of alterity for monolingual viewers. For the bilingual, who both hear and read the words, they produce both excessive emphases and certain discordances of meaning, because of their spatial and temporal discordances and syncopations with the soundtrack. But, Lo claims, “To a presumptuous Western audience, the poor English subtitles make Hong Kong films more ‘Chinese’ by underscoring the linguistic difference” (51). Thus, for bilingual audiences (such as many Hong Kong Chinese, who have historically been able to speak both English and Cantonese), the subtitles introduce an excess that simultaneously introduces alterity through their fracturing and alienating effects. For monolingual “foreign” audiences, Lo argues that the subtitles also produce an “extra” dimension: a very particular form of pleasure and enjoyment. This extra is not an extra to a primary or proper text. It is rather an excess generated from a lack. It is an excess—pleasure, amusement on finding the subtitles “funny.” And Lo’s primary contention is that, in this sense, the subtitles actually preclude the possibility of a proper “weight” or “gravity” for the films, that they are a supplement that precludes the establishment of a

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proper status, a proper meaning, a properly “non-excessive” non-“lite”/ trite status. Thus, the subtitles are a visual excess according to Lo.6 For monolingual or euro-lingual viewers, the visual excess is the mark (or stain) that signifies a semantic lack. This might be a mark of viewers’ own inability and lack of linguistic and cultural knowledge rather than any necessary semantic deficiency in the text itself; but the point is, argues Lo, “the words onscreen always consciously remind viewers of the other’s existence” (48). In either case, this very lack generates an excess. As Lo puts it, “The fractured subtitles may puzzle the viewers who need them, and yet they also give rise to a peculiar kind of pleasure” (54). That is, “The articulation of the loss of proper meaning offers a pleasure of its own to those who treasure alternative aesthetics and practice a radical connoisseurship that views mass culture’s vulgarity as the equal of avant-garde high art” (54). Lo calls this the pleasure of “being adrift”: “Drifting pleasure occurs when definite meaning can no longer be grasped.” He proposes, “Bad English subtitles may kindle a kind of pleasure that was never meant to be there” (54). He goes on to insist that A subtitled Hong Kong film received in the West produces a residual irrationality that fascinates its hardcore fans. Apparently, a dubbed Hong Kong film would not offer the same sort of additional fun. The distorted meaning of the English subtitles is not to be overlooked. On the contrary, the distortion is written into the very essence of Hong Kong films and is one of the major appeals for Western fans. It is an unexpected boon that increases the viewer’s already considerable enjoyment. (56)

Thus, he argues against the suggestions of commentators like Ascheid who have proposed that subtitled film fundamentally “contains a number of reflexive elements which hold a much larger potential to break cinematic identification, the suspension of disbelief and a continuous experience of unruptured pleasure” (Ascheid, qtd. in Lo 56).7 Against such arguments, Lo proposes that “[i]n the case of subtitled Hong Kong films, these arguments are no longer valid” (56). This is because, with these martial arts films, the “disruption of cinematic identification and the perception of difference might generate extra enjoyment but never a ‘loss of pleasure’ ” (56). For, in martial arts films, suggests Lo, “rupture does not necessarily give rise to ‘intellectual evaluation and analysis’; rather, it lends to a film’s fetishistic appeal” (56).

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Stupid Lee So, the subtitles are constructed with “incompetence” by the undereducated and underpaid subtitlers. They are destined to be an unnecessary supplement for Chinese speakers and an excessive supplement for those who can also read Chinese. For Westerners, these supplements are destined to work to turn the movies into a joke. Indeed, apart from the thrills to be gained from watching the physical action of the martial choreography, the subtitles are destined to become the fetish which defines the nature of Western viewers’ interest in Hong Kong films.8 Fun, off-center, camp, incompetent, uneducated, excessive, physical, intrusive: The way Lo constructs and represents Hong Kong cinema “in general” is not particularly far removed from the way that the Hollywood camera constructs the bumbling, bothersome Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (see Morris 2001). Of course, Lo is putatively dealing with the “reception” and “interpretation” of Hong Kong films by Western viewers. Thus, according to Lo, it is the Western viewers, in their ignorance, who construct the dubbed Hong Kong films as low-brow, “down-market amusements” (56). But the likelihood or generality of such a reception is over-determined by the conspiring factors of undereducated subtitlers who are, moreover, overworked and underpaid by an industry in a hurry to shift its product. Thus, even if the Hong Kong films are sophisticated, complex texts, this dimension is going to be forever foreclosed to the monolingual or euro-lingual Western viewer. What is lost in the double translation from living speech to incompetent writing is logos. What remains is the nonsense of the body and gibberish, unintelligible baby talk. As such, the only people who could possibly be interested in such a spectacle are, of course, stupid people. Lo does not say this explicitly. But everything in his argument suggests the operation of a very familiar logic: the denigration of popular culture, the conviction that it is stupid. In his own words, the badly subtitled film entails “the loss of proper meaning [which] offers a pleasure of its own to those who treasure alternative aesthetics and practice a radical connoisseurship that views mass culture’s vulgarity as the equal of avant-garde high art” (54). Thus, to Lo, “mass culture” is characterized by “vulgarity” and is not the equal of “avant-garde high art.” Popular culture is stupid. Lo’s attendant argument, that the clunky subtitles are not really an “obstacle” to the smooth global circulation of commodities, but rather the condition of possibility for the success of the martial arts films is similar. As he claims: “globalization is facilitated by the ‘hindrance’ or the ‘symbolic

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resistance’ inherent in the clumsy English subtitles—which represent a certain cultural specificity or designate certain ethnic characteristics of the port city” (54). Thus, Lo imagines the appeal of such films to be entirely fetishistic and ultimately racist. For, in Lo’s conceptualization, what Western audiences want is a foreignness to laugh at. As such, it is the films’ very palpable foreignness which helps them to succeed. Indeed, he concludes, “[T]he subtitles as good and pleasing otherness are actually founded on the exclusion of the political dimension usually immanent in the encounter of the cultural other” (58). This is a core dimension of Lo’s argument: “Hong Kong cinema is basically perceived as a ‘good other’ to the American viewer insofar as it is analogous to the old Hollywood” (57). Thus, for Lo, the matter of subtitles in Hong Kong film ultimately amounts to a process of depoliticization. Yet, is this in fact the case?

Original Lee The 1972 international blockbuster Fist of Fury (also known as Jîng Wuˇ Mén [精武門] in Chinese and The Chinese Connection in the United States) begins with a burial. The founder of the Jîng Wuˇ martial arts school in the Shanghai International Settlement (1854 –1943)—the much mythologized historical figure, Huo Yuanjia—has died (1910). Before the very first scene, a narrator tells us that the events surrounding Master Huo’s death have always been shrouded in mystery, and that the film we are about to watch offers “one possible version” (“the most popular version”) of what may have happened. What happens— or what could have happened, according to this fable—is that Huo’s favorite pupil, Chen Zhen, played by Bruce Lee, returns to the Jîng Wuˇ School and refuses to accept that his master died of natural causes. At the official funeral the next day, an entourage from a Japanese Bushido School arrives, late. They bear a gift, as was traditional. But the gift turns out to be an insult and a provocation: a framed inscription of the words “Sick Man of Asia” (東亞病夫/do¯ng yà bìng fu¯). Upon delivering this, the Japanese throw down a challenge, via their intermediary, the creepy, effeminate, and decidedly queer translator called Wuˇ (or, sometimes, Hu): If any Chinese martial artist can beat them, the Japanese martial artists will “eat these words.” So begins what has become regarded as a martial arts classic. The film is organized by Bruce Lee’s Chen Zhen’s ultimately suicidal quest for revenge against what turns out to have been not merely a Japanese martial arts challenge (Lee, of course, picks up the gauntlet thrown down by the

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Japanese—besting the entire Japanese school single-handedly the next day) but also a murderous piece of treachery: Lee subsequently discovers that his master was poisoned by two impostors who had been posing as Chinese cooks, but who were really Japanese spies. Again, their intermediary, their contact, the communicator of the orders, was the translator, Mr. Wuˇ. Thus, what begins with a crass and irreverent ethno-nationalist slur at a Chinese master’s funeral, turns out to be part of a concerted plot to destroy the entire Chinese institution. As Fist of Fury makes clear, the assassination and the plot to destroy Jîng Wuˇ arose precisely because the Japanese were deeply concerned that the Chinese were, far from being “sick men,” actually too healthy, and could become too strong and pose too much of a potential challenge if left to their own devices. However, as the film also makes clear, in this colonial situation, the odds have been stacked against the Chinese from the outset—no matter what they decide to do; they will not be left alone or allowed to prosper. The translator is the first point of contact between the two cultures. The first face-to-face encounter follows the earlier behind-the-back, underhanded and unequal contact of spying and assassination. To the Chinese, Wuˇ is consistently belligerent, disrespectful, and abusive. To the Japanese, he is an obsequious crawler. On first face-to-face contact, at the funeral, Wuˇ taunts the mourners, telling them that they are weak, pathetic, and no better than cowardly dogs—simply because they are Chinese. A senior Chinese student (played by James Tien Chun) is evidently confused: He approaches Wuˇ and demands an answer to one question. In the dubbed English version the question is: “Look here! Now, just what is the point of this?” And the answer is given: “Just that the Chinese are a race of weaklings, no comparison to us Japanese.” So, here, Wuˇ is Japanese. However, in the English subtitled version, the question and answer are somewhat different. Here, the Chinese student says: “One question, are you Chinese?” To this, the reply is: “Yes, but even though we are of the same kind, our paths in life are vastly different.” So here, Wuˇ is Chinese. This disjunction between the subtitled version and the dubbed version may seem only to raise some fairly mundane questions of translation: namely, which version is correct, which version is faithful to the original? If by “original,” we mean the Cantonese audio track, then, in this instance at least, it is the subtitles that follow it most closely.9 But, as my act of distinguishing the audio tracks from the visual material implies, it seems valid to suggest, precisely because it is possible to separate out these various elements, that it is the very notion of the original here that should be engaged. The film was “shot postsynch,” with the soundtrack added to the

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film only after the entire film was shot (Lo 50). As such, the visual and the aural are already technically divergent, distinct textual combinations, even in the putative “original.” And, if we wish to refer to it, the question must be: Which original? It is of more than anecdotal interest to note at this point that the actor who plays the translator here—Paul Wei Ping-Ao—provided the voiceover not only for the Cantonese audio but also for the English audio. This means that the actor who plays the translator is also actually an active part of the translation of the text. It also means that the translated version of this film is also another/different “original” version: a secondary, supplementary original, playing the part of a translation. It equally means that, given the overlapping production and translation processes involved in the technical construction of not “this film” but rather “these films,” the quest to establish and separate the original from the copy or the original from the translation becomes vertiginous. Certain binaries are blurred because of this fractured bilinguality. These are the very binaries that fundamentally structure and hierarchize many approaches to translation: fidelity/infidelity, primary/secondary, original/ copy, authentic/construction, and so on.10 Here, the fractured bilinguality is itself symptomatic of what we might call (following Benjamin) a Chinese “intention” in a text produced in British Hong Kong about Japanese colonialism. This is a multiply-colonized text about a colonial situation produced in a different colonial context. In it, the supposedly stable binaries of text and translation are substantially unsettled. Indeed I suggest, that what we are able to see here is what Rey Chow calls a “materialist though elusive fact about translation” (185)—namely, to use Walter Benjamin’s proposition that “translation is primarily a process of putting together” (185). As Chow explains, for Benjamin, translation is a process that “demonstrates that the ‘original,’ too, is something that has been put together”—and she, following Benjamin, adds: “in its violence” (Chow, Primitive 185). What part does “violence” play, here?

Violent Lee There are several obvious forms of violence in the assembling of both the English and the Cantonese versions. Obviously, there is the well-worn theme of the ethnonationalist violence of the film’s primary drama: Bruce Lee’s fantastic, phantasmatic, suicidal, symbolic victory (even in death) over the Japanese oppressors. But there is also the more subtle “violence” or “forcing” involved in constraining the English dubbing to synching with

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the lip movements of a different-language dialogue. This is “violent” in its semiotic consequences. For instance, as we have already seen, it violently simplifies the complexity of the translator, Mr. Wuˇ. In the dubbed version, he becomes simply Japanese and therefore simply other. And this signals or exemplifies a further dimension. The dubbed version seems to drastically simplify the situation of the film. That is, it dislodges the visibility of the themes of the politics of coloniality that are central to the subtitled (and presumably also to the Cantonese) versions, and empties out the sociopolitical complexity of the film, transforming it into a rather childish tale of bullies and bullying: In the dubbed version, the Japanese bully the innocent and consistently confused Chinese, simply because they are bullies. More complex issues are often elided. This is nowhere more clear than in the difference between the question “nıˇ shì Zhông guó rén ma?” (“Are you Chinese?”) and the alternative question, “Just what is the point of this?” However, although “Are you Chinese?” is literally faithful to the Cantonese, and although “What is the point of this?” is not, and is more simplistic, I do not want to discount, discard, or disparage this literally inadequate translation. This is not least because the question “Just what is the point of this?” is surely one of the most challenging and important questions to which academics really ought to respond. It is also because the unfaithful translation is the one that perhaps most enables the film to be transmissible—that is, to make sense elsewhere, in the non-Chinese contexts of the film’s own transnational diasporic dissemination. This recall’s Benjamin’s point that a work’s “transmissibility” actually arises “in opposition to its ‘truth’ ” (Chow, Primitive 199). This contention arises in Benjamin’s discussion of Kafka, in which he asserts that “Kafka’s work presents a sickness of tradition” in which the “consistency of truth . . . has been lost” (185). Thus, suggests Benjamin, Kafka “sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility” (Benjamin qtd. in Chow, Primitive 199). Picking up on this, Chow adds Vattimo’s Nietzschean proposal that this “sickness” is constitutive of transmissibility and is what enables and drives the “turning and twisting of tradition away from its metaphysical foundations, a movement that makes way for the hybrid cultures of contemporary society” (195).11 This issue of transmissibility might be taken to suggest one of two things: Either, “Just what is the point of this?” is the more primary or more “universal” question, because it is more transmissible, or this translation / transformation loses the essential stakes of the local specificity of the ethnonationalist question “Are you Chinese?”

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Rather than adjudicating on the question of transmissibility and (or vs.) truth in “direct” terms, it strikes me as more responsible to expose each of these questions to each other. Thus, in the face of the question “Are you Chinese?” we might ask, “Just what is the point of this?” and vice versa. In doing so, we ought to be able to perceive a certain ethno-nationalist “violence” lurking in the construction of the former question. For instance, “Are you Chinese?” is regularly leveled—accusingly—at translated or globally successful “Chinese” films. It is often asked aggressively, pejoratively, and dismissively, as if simultaneously demanding fidelity and essence, and suggesting treachery. The accusative question leveled at Hu, the translator, strongly implies that if Hu is Chinese, then he, in being a translator, is a traitor. Translator, traitor: “Traduttore, traditore,” runs the Italian expression. But in Fist of Fury there is more. The translator is a perverter: a perverter of tradition, first of all. And also: a very queer character. The film draws a relation between translator and queerness. It makes the translator queer. Because he crosses over.

Queer Lee In Fist of Fury, the translator adopts Western sartorial norms and works for the powerful Japanese presence that exerts such a considerable force in the international settlement in Shanghai. He enables communication between the Chinese and the Japanese institutions, and also sabotages one institution’s development at a particularly fraught moment—the funeral, the moment of transition /translation /passing over from one generation to the next, from the stability of the founding master’s presence and protection to the uncertain leadership of his multiple senior students. The translator, in fact, precipitated this unnatural crisis in the first place—installing spies and transmitting assassination orders. The translator is a perverter. So, it is unsurprising that he has been constructed as certainly “queer” and probably gay. In this largely erotically neutered film, Mr. Hu’s sexuality is unclear. All that is clear is that he is creepy and effeminate. But if we are in any doubt about his sexuality, this same character, played by the same actor, was to return in Lee’s next film, Way of the Dragon (1972). Lee himself directed Way of the Dragon and plays Tang Lung, a mainland / New Territories Hong Kong martial artist who flies to Rome to help his friend’s niece when her restaurant business is threatened by a veritably multicultural, interra-

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cial “mafia” gang. The Chinese title of Way of the Dragon (Meng Long Guo Jiang / 猛龍過江) is rendered literally as something like “the fierce dragon crosses the river,” which refers to travel and migration, and hence to the diasporic Chinese crossing over to Europe. In both Fist of Fury and Way of the Dragon, the same actor plays virtually the same character. However, in the European location of Way of the Dragon, we have crossed over from “traditional” China to “modern” Europe. So the translator becomes blatantly gay: wearing flamboyant clothing and behaving flirtatiously with Lee’s character Tang Lung (Chan 378). In the later film, the translator is “queerness unleashed.” But the point to be emphasized here is that the same reiterated rendering of the translator as creepy and queer is central to both films—in much the same way that Judas is central to the story of Jesus. If it were not for him, none of this would be possible, but as a contact zone or agency of communication and movement, he is responsible for warping and perverting things. In both films, the translator enters at a moment or situation of crossing over, and signals the break, the end of stability, the severance from paternal protection, from tradition. “And yet,” notes Chow, “the word tradition itself, linked in its roots to translation and betrayal, has to do with handing over. Tradition itself is nothing if it is not a transmission. How is tradition to be transmitted, to be passed on, if not through translation?” (Primitive 183). Chow’s championing of such translation notwithstanding, the answer to her rhetorical question (“How is tradition to be transmitted, to be passed on, if not through translation?”) as (if ) it is given by both films is not that tradition ought to be transmitted through translation, but rather that tradition ought to be transmitted through monolingualism and monoculturalism. The problem—and it is presented as a problem in the films—is that culture does not stay “mono.” Its authorities want it to be; its institutions try to make it stay so; but it cannot. Even the most pure repetition is never pure, but is rather impure—a reiteration that differs and alters, introducing alterity, however slightly: re-itera, as Derrida alerted us. Basically, that is, one does not “need” an insidious translator to pervert things. The unstoppable flow of transnational popular cultural products, commodities, and practices; mass media sounds and images; and filmic texts does the job of the perverter well enough. And surely far more cross-cultural encounters, exchanges, and transactions are enacted by way of mass commodities than by way of dry hermeneutic or linguistic translation. Given this plague of contact zones, Chow argues: “[C]ultural translation can no longer be thought of simply in linguistic terms, as the translation between Western and Eastern verbal languages alone” (196 –97).

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Rather, proposes Chow, “cultural translation needs to be rethought as the co-temporal exchange and contention between different social groups deploying different sign systems that may not be synthesizable to one particular model of language or representation” (197). As such: Considerations of the translation of or between cultures . . . have to move beyond verbal and literary languages to include events of the media such as radio, film, television, video, pop music, and so forth, without writing such events off as mere examples of mass indoctrination. Conversely, the media, as the loci of cultural translation, can now be seen as what helps to weaken the (literary, philosophical, and epistemological) foundations of Western domination and what makes the encounter between cultures a fluid and open-ended experience. (197)

Once again, it strikes me as important to reiterate at this point that although the encounters of cultural translation may be fluid and open-ended, the treatment of such encounters by academics and cultural commentators is far from fluid and open-ended. On the contrary, such treatment seems rigid— over-determined, even. Translation encounters of or between cultures are, in fact, regularly treated by academics and cultural commentators rather like the way the translator is treated in these films: He is ridiculed, reviled, and killed—but too late. Such films, whether putatively lowbrow like these or supposedly highbrow like those of Zhang Yimou or Ang Lee, are often regarded with disdain: as not “real,” not “true,” or not “faithful” translations of that fantastic phantasmatic essentialized entity known as “China.”12 Such texts are regularly written off as trivial and trivializing, commodified, orientalist, unfaithful, secondary, derived, warped, warping, and so on. But as the works of thinkers like Chow have proposed, such responses to migrant texts like these might be (essentialized as) essentialist. Nevertheless, asks Chow, “[C]an we theorize translation between cultures without somehow valorizing some ‘original’?” (192). Moreover, “can we theorize translation between cultures in a manner that does not implicitly turn translation into an interpretation toward depth, toward ‘profound meaning’?” (192).13 Her answer urges us to rethink translation by way of mass commodities, whose “transmissibility” arguably arises “in opposition to . . . ‘truth’ ” in the context of a “sickness of tradition” (199). This “sickness” is actually constitutive of transmissibility, suggests Chow (195). To this I would add: This sickness is queer. In constructing the translator as a traitor and “therefore” as queer, both of these films cling to tradition—a tradition that seems universal and seems to need no translating. If we ask of this tradition, “Are you Chinese?” the answer must be: yes, but

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no; yes and no.14 And if we ask “Just what is the point of this?” one answer must be that it points to a queer relation—but a clear relation—between translation and queering, about which much could be said. But the point I want to emphasize here is that the primary field of “translation between cultures,” through their twisting, turning, concatenation, warping, and “queering” is, of course, that supposed “realm” (which could perhaps be rather better understood as the condition) called mass or popular culture. As we have seen, Chow’s contention is that “There are multiple reasons why a consideration of mass culture is crucial to cultural translation” (193). To her mind, “the predominant one” is to examine “that asymmetry of power relations between the ‘first’ and the ‘third’ worlds” (193). However, she continues immediately, “Critiquing the great disparity between Europe and the rest of the world means not simply a deconstruction of Europe as origin or simply a restitution of the origin that is Europe’s others but a thorough dismantling of both the notion of origin and the notion of alterity as we know them today” (193–94). In Bruce Lee’s films, of course—in a manner akin to the arguments of the critics who regard popular filmic representations as betrayals of “China”—the “origin” is avowedly not Europe, but “China,” the spectral, haunting, “absent presence,” the evocation (or illusion–allusion) of “China.” From this perspective, there are two alterities: the “simple” alterity of the enemy, and the “double” alterity of the translator. In Fist of Fury, alterity seems unequivocal: an enemy (the colonizers, Japan in particular). When Hong Kong films, such as Way of the Dragon, cross over to Europe, however, origin and alterity become more complicated.

European Lee In Lee’s first martial arts film, The Big Boss (1971), Lee plays a migrant Chinese worker in Thailand—a country boy cum migrant proletarian whose enemy is a foreign capitalist /criminal. In Fist of Fury, when hiding from the authorities, Chen Zhen’s peers emphasize that even though they cannot find him, he surely cannot be far away because he is a country boy who does not know Shanghai. In Way of the Dragon, in Italy, Lee’s character rejoices in the fact that he comes not from urban Hong Kong but from the rural mainland New Territories. Dragged grudgingly on a tour of the sites of Rome, he is evidently rather under-whelmed. In the sole scene of Fist of Fury that was filmed outdoors, at the entrance to a segregated public park, Lee’s character evidently wants to go into the park only because, being Chi-

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nese, he is not allowed. China has been provincialized: a turban-wearing, English-speaking Indian official at the gate directs Lee’s attention to a sign that says “No Chinese and Dogs Allowed.” In other words, all of the injustices in Lee’s Hong Kong films are organized along ethno-nationalist and class lines, and the notion of the origin in these films is the idea of mainland China. This idea in itself provincializes the various locations of each of the films. All of the places that are “not China” are just vaguely “somewhere else,” and that elsewhere is “bad” (or at least not very good) because, wherever it is, it is “not China”—not free, proud, strong, independent China. Of course, in sharing this tendency, these films construct a Chinese identity that is based on actively celebrating or enjoying being what Chow calls “the West’s ‘primitive others’ ” (Primitive 194).15 To this extent, these films may easily seem, in Chow’s words, to be “equally caught up in the generalized atmosphere of unequal power distribution and [to be] actively (re)producing within themselves the structures of domination and hierarchy that are as typical of non-European cultural histories as they are of European imperialism” (194). Yet, at the same time, they are also and nevertheless (to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s term) actively involved in “provincializing Europe,” albeit without any reciprocal (self-reflexive) problematization of “China” (see Chow Primitive 195). Such a problematization was, however, arguably embryonic and growing in many of Lee’s other works—in TV roles, personal writings, and interviews, Lee increasingly gestured to a postnationalist, liberal multiculturalist ideology—and it was perhaps “in the post” at the time of his death in the form of his declared intentions for his unfinished film Game of Death. But even his “early” film, Way of the Dragon, even though it is certainly caught up in a degree of masochistic enjoyment of Chinese victimhood, arguably enacts what Chow’s proposed approach to film (“as ethnography”) could construe as a significant discursive move. The very first scenes of Way of the Dragon place Lee in the arrivals area of an airport in Rome. Lee is surrounded by white Westerners and is being stared at, implacably, unremittingly, and inscrutably by a middle-aged white woman. This lengthy, awkward, and tense scene goes nowhere. The woman is eventually dragged away by a man who comes to meet her. It is followed immediately by a lengthy scene in which Lee’s character goes in search of food within the airport. First he approaches a child and asks “food?,” “eat?” and then, pointing to his mouth, “eggs?” whereupon the camera changes to the child’s point of view, showing a huge towering man

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looming over the child, pointing at his own mouth and making horrendous gurgling sounds. The child screams, and Lee’s Tang Lung hurries away. He soon stumbles across a restaurant, which he enters. Unable to make sense of the Italian menu, he points confidently to more than half a dozen dishes—all of which turn out to be different kinds of soup. So Lee is presented with a ludicrous dinner of multiple bowls of soup, which he brazenly pretends he knew he had ordered. These slow, clumsy, and somewhat bizarre scenes could easily strike viewers, especially white Western viewers, as a peculiar way to begin a martial arts film —a film, it should be noted, that very soon opens out into extreme violence, murder, mortal treachery, and even a gladiatorial fight to the death in the Roman Coliseum. Beginning such a film with these rather tortuous efforts at comedy seems to be a peculiar directorial decision. However, there is something significant in the way that these opening scenes dramatize ethnic experience. The film shows us an ethnic “viewed object,” of course. But it does so from a crucial point of view, one in which “ ‘viewed object’ is now looking at ‘viewing subject’ looking” (Chow 1995, 180 –81). Thus, over 20 years before Chow proposed precisely such a twisting (or queering) of specular relations away from a simple subject– object dieresis as the way to escape the deadlock of Western anthropology, “simple” popular cultural artifacts like this film were already actively engaged in this deconstruction, in which Europe is not the viewing subject and Europe is not “the gaze,” and in which—as Way of the Dragon seems to be at pains to make plain—Europe is just some place. Europe never becomes origin or destination in the film. In fact Italy itself never really becomes much more than an airport lounge—a zone of indeterminacy, a contact zone; just some place or other, between origin-A and destination-B, C, D, or X, Y, Z. Lee leaves Hong Kong to help a diasporic working community. He flies to Europe. The Europeans cannot defeat him. Frustrated, they arrange to fly-in “America’s best.” America’s best takes the form of “Colt,” a martial artist played by Chuck Norris. Colt flies in. His arrival is filmed from a low angle. He walks down from a jet plane and toward the camera. A drum beat marks every powerful step. As he approaches, what is increasingly foregrounded is his crotch. When he reaches the camera, it is his crotch that comes to fill the entire screen and closes the scene. And so it continues: As has been much remarked, Colt is all crotch; Lee is all lithe, striated torso. Their warm-ups are more like foreplay; their fighting is more like love-making (Chan; Hunt). But the film plays on the standard semiotics of powerful masculinity; in other words, it treads a fine line between emphasizing heteronormativity and

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crossing over into outright homoeroticism. Hating the queer element is important in order to assert that this text itself is not of or for the queer, while all the time exemplifying the polymorphously perverse recombination, intermingling, and reconstitution of cultures, provincializing and queering Europe.

What’s Queer about Remy, Ratatouille, and French Cuisine? Laure Murat

“What’s queer about Remy?” is the question that I will ask about Ratatouille (2007), the spectacular animated blockbuster film from Pixar Studios that won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and a dozen other international prizes. What visual and textual rhetoric does the film use to transform a rat, an object of disgust associated with disease and filth, into a celebrated French chef ? I propose to analyze the ways in which Ratatouille queers not just sexualized categories but also the spatialization of social roles, the notion of national culture, as well as the opposition between humans and non-humans. Ratatouille begins when a hundred rats flee a suburban house and move to Paris via the sewage system. Remy, the hero, is separated from his family and saved by a book that he uses as a raft. The book /raft, Anyone Can Cook, was written by his idol, the famous French chef Auguste Gusteau, who recently passed away. Helped by Gusteau’s ghost, a Tinker Bell–like hologram that regularly pops up at critical junctures, Remy ends up in the kitchen of “Gusteau’s,” the most famous Parisian restaurant now run by the cantankerous Skinner. Befriended by Linguini, a young garbage boy who knows nothing about cooking, he devises a clever stratagem: Hidden under 136

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the chef ’s hat, he will direct Linguini’s moves by pulling his hair as a puppet master would pull strings; Remy cooks through Linguini who becomes increasingly successful. When Linguini, who turns out to be Gusteau’s biological son, claims his inheritance, Skinner swears to avenge himself. Having discovered Remy’s role, he kidnaps him just before a visit of the formidable food critic Anton Ego who had already criticized Gusteau’s cuisine. When Remy escapes in the nick of time, Linguini reveals the truth to his co-workers: a rat is the real chef. They leave the restaurant horrified. Rejected by humans, Remy calls the rats to the rescue and cooks his “chef d’œuvre”: a “ratatouille” that Anton Ego finds sublime. Gusteau’s, however, must close down after a visit by the food hygiene inspectors who find rats in the kitchen. At the end of the film, Linguini and Remy have opened a new restaurant, La Ratatouille, where humans and rats cohabitate peacefully.

Queerness as the Blurring of Boundaries: A Human–Non-Human Closet Space At the beginning of the film, Remy points out what is at stake in Ratatouille: “What’s my problem? First, I am a rat. Second, I have an exceptional sense of taste and smell.” Remy’s problem is that the combination is queered by his determination to use his gift in a way that excludes himself from his community of fellow rats. His sense of smell could make him a useful “poison sniffer” among rats but he wants to be a chef. On the other hand, as a rat he is not welcome in human kitchens and positions himself outside two communities even though he belongs to both. Because Remy does not wish to belong to his kind, he occupies a queer space of exclusion: He is too sophisticated for rats and still a rat to humans. His only solution is to occupy a closet that the film constructs as the inside of the “chef ’s hat” from which Remy can queer his own identity as well as the assumptions on which the human /non-human opposition are founded. Remy is not visually different from other rats. Much thinner and shorter than his fat brown brother Emile, smaller and weaker than his father Django, he is drawn with a substantially bigger and “super sensitive” pink nose. He does not identify with his rat’s life: He denies being a garbage thief, and refuses to get his paws dirty because he is only interested in gastronomy. He does not want to scavenge for food, but wishes to “create” by exploring the most subtle combinations of ingredients and flavors. He leads, as he puts it, “a secret life,” and has even learned how to read, which Emile finds outrageously subversive: “God! Does Dad know?” he exclaims

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when he finds out. His characterological traits, physical appearance, and preferences thus construct him as an outsider of sorts. Remy’s secret life does not fit within the spatial borders constructed within the film either. In Ratatouille, the world of the rats lies below, in the darkness and humidity, the sewer, the streets, and the garbage. Humans live above them, in the “city of lights” and refined food. The camera constantly pans up and down, to indicate the point of view of rats and humans. This vertical inter-species hierarchy corresponds to a horizontal division between the world of the kitchen, a mysterious laboratory where everybody shouts, and the dining room where guests talk softly while listening to classical music. Hidden under Linguini’s hat, Remy occupies the apex of this spatial configuration. He can see everything and everyone in the kitchen because the chef ’s hat is transparent but he cannot be seen by anyone else— except by the spectator, who is aware of the existence of this queer space. The spatial coordinates are thus bifurcated. A vertical hierarchy corresponds to the horizontal one, but Remy’s position is neither within one or other of the four spaces produced. Instead, he is privy to all four hierarchical spaces, moving in and out of them both physically and through the exercise of his sight through the transparent (to him and the spectators) chef ’s hat. The spatial transgression of hierarchies and the visual omniscience of Remy’s position confounds binary constructions while acknowledging their power. According to Brad Bird, the director of the movie, the trick of the hat’s semi-transparency emerged during the making of the film and was his “most important idea,” a “very liberating one.”1 Correspondingly, Remy did not need to peek out of the hat in order to see what was going on and thus risk being discovered. These ingenious “refracted transparencies” where Remy can look out without being seen while we, the viewers can see through the hat, suggests new perspectives on the closet. The closet has been a classic topos among queer theorists as Katherine Bourguignon reminds us: The closet stands as a metaphor for the silence of secrets, the upkeep of the status quo, and the distinction between private and public, inside and outside. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick labeled the closet “a shaping presence” in the lives of gay people, and John Clum noted that “the closet is less a place than a performance— or series of performances, maintained by the heterosexist wish for, and sometimes enforcement of, homosexual silence and invisibility.” (Bourguignon 4)

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In Ratatouille, the chef ’s hat is clearly this “shaping presence” and a protected “series of performances” in Remy’s life. Its transparency associates it to Sedgwick’s “glass closet” (164 –65). In Epistemology of the Closet, she describes it as an open secret, a place where gay people live as if nobody knew they were gay, although everybody knows. Ratatouille queers the open secret because the “glass closet” is both translucent and opaque, reflecting and refracting multiple visibilities for differentially located viewers. Remy, from within the hat, knows who the real cook is and observes the scene, while the official cooks looking at him do not see him. The audience, however, can see him and knows about the closet while the cooks see their own image reflected in the white chef ’s hat. Bird has constructed a refracting closet that both includes (the subjectivity of the hero and the spectator) and excludes (the characters). In addition to the queering of Remy’s character and of space and visuality, effects of queer inclusion and exclusion are produced by the film’s use of languages. When rats talk to each other, the spectator is included: The rats speak English. But if one of the characters in the story hears their conversation, the spectator only perceives incomprehensible gurgling sounds and is thus re-aligned with humans. The film lets the audience move in and out of an inter-species third space that constructs an intimate and rather queer relationship between (some) rats and (some) humans. The spectator is thus invited to be part of Remy’s experiment. As the hidden cook who transforms a boy into a puppet, he brings together animals, humans, and non-humans as well as ingredients. This position, however, is never celebrated as a hybrid paradise and the existence of a queer audience is both presented as a possibility and questioned: It is perhaps as spectral as Gusteau’s ghost to whom Remy talks when he complains about the difficulty of his position: “I am sick of pretending. I pretend to be a rat for my father; I pretend to be a human through Linguini. I pretend you exist so I have someone to talk to!” On the one hand, Ratatouille is the story of a successful coming-out, which helps Remy gain the esteem of his father, of Anton Ego, and the team of cooks who agree to work with him, while queering the original division of space. At the end of the film, the recognition of Remy as a real chef brings about the ruin of the old system of domination. In terms of space and species, the rodents, now accepted by the kitchen team, have turned the attic of the restaurant into their own nicely decorated dining room lit up with candles. Downstairs, spaces and roles are redistributed: The kitchen now opens onto a cozy Parisian bistro quite unlike the old-

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fashioned and rather pretentious Gusteau’s. In terms of social power, the fierce and almighty Anton Ego, now a discredited critic, is hardly recognizable: He is a smiling and relaxed customer, whom Remy greets from the kitchen, wearing his own chef ’s hat.

Queering Sexuality and/or Gender Roles? Remy is also queer to the extent that he troubles the heteronormativity symbolized by his father and brother. Their male bonding and straight complicity are especially evident when they mock Remy’s slight frame, sniggering: “Is it a shortage of food or an excess of snobbery?” Remy’s difference is not described as a form of gayness; his queerness is an “otherness” that goes beyond gender or (a)sexuality, though the slightness of his frame suggests a stereotypical image of the gay male in the eyes of heteronormative masculinity. He is also a cook who mingles with human beings. Remy’s presence in the kitchen leads to a queering of essentialist norms. His metaphorical description of his journey, however, is lost on his father who insists on borders between species: Remy: Every bird has to leave the nest . . . Django: We are not birds, we are rats! We don’t leave the nest, we make it bigger! Remy: Perhaps I am a different kind of rat! Django: Maybe you are not a rat at all! Remy: Perhaps it’s a good thing! Django explains: “You are talking like a human!” his comment taking the discussion toward considerations of “nature.” To convince his son that he is heading for disaster if he associates with humans, the father leads him to the shop window of a rat exterminator where dozens of rat corpses hang from traps: Django: This is the way things are. You can’t change nature. Remy: Change is nature, Dad. The part that we can influence. And it starts when we decide. (Remy walks away.) Django: Where are you going? Remy: With luck, forward. Ratatouille seems to be an anti-essentialist manifesto that suggests a move forward through escaping the closet /prison of “rathood.” He refutes not only “family values” but also clichés about genealogy, heredity, and bloodlines. Remy’s exceptional gift for cooking is thus mirrored by Linguini’s

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lack of inherited talent. At the same time, given the way he moves both back-and-forth and sideways between different spaces, Remy also draws the complex lines of a queer trajectory that is not just about “coming out” but constantly moving in and out, forward as well as sideways. Even Anton Ego, at the end of the film, suggests that he is willing to privilege art and downplay the significance of origin and identity: I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: “Anyone can cook.” But I realize that only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius [Remy] now cooking at Gusteau’s. He is, in this critic’s opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France.

It is worth noting, however, that the film’s quasi-theoretical affirmation of queer perspectives does not necessarily promote an unambiguously progressive gender agenda. The portrayal of women in Ratatouille deserves a few remarks. Of the four female characters, two make only fleeting appearances. Food critic Solène LeClair barely says a word during her threeminute on-screen performance and Anton Ego’s mother is seen only in his blissful dream as the holy figure who cooked the perfect ratatouille of his childhood. The others are two different types of viragos who respectively embody past and modern France. Mabel, the old lady who evicts the rats from her suburban home, will probably be perceived as a fearsome villain by the children who constitute the film’s target audience (she shoots her rifles in a rather terrifying way). The only well-rounded female character is also the only woman in the kitchen. Colette is a caricature of the feminist virago, a shorthaired brunette who speaks English with a strong French accent and rides a black motorcycle.2 Her butch persona may be the only factor that queers the representation of Remy’s stereotypically gendered professional world. If cooking, like hairdressing or sewing, is seen as a traditionally feminine activity, when practiced at a high professional level, it becomes a male-dominated vocation (and is then called haute coiffure, haute couture, and gastronomy). Unlike men involved in hairdressing or haute couture, however, the chef is not a typically gay icon. The world of professional cooking remains a very straight, heterosexist, if not macho bastion. In that sense, Colette, despite her prominent role as a cook, remains under Skinner’s command and in the shadow of Gusteau’s memory. She was trained a dutiful soldier. She religiously follows the Master’s recipes, unable to depart from his book or to let others try. She is thus condemned to (mechanical) reproduction, an activity usually associated with women.

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Queering the Race, the Nation, and Its Cuisine If traditional gender roles remain relatively undisturbed in Ratatouille, then the way in which the film queers notions of ethnicity and national identities is deserving of further consideration. Ratatouille is an American film about French cuisine and Frenchness that queers both American and European stereotypes about identities and national cultures. Ratatouille can hardly be read as a typically American celebration of individualist triumph. The film does not replace one authoritarian and solitary chef (Skinner) with a better individual. Instead, it celebrates solidarity (among rats and humans). The team of cooks wins over Anton Ego’s heart. Moreover, the relationship between cuisine as art and imagination, and cuisine as commerce is systematically addressed: Skinner’s ambition to make a fortune by creating a frozen food empire using Gusteau’s name is obviously criticized. The mixing between members of different communities or species is presented as the antidote to a compartmentalized and sanitized world: The neutralization of the hygiene inspector who is locked in the cellar by rats is presented as a moment of triumph. Ratatouille is therefore a good example of what Judith Halberstam has recently called “Pixarvolt,” the technological and ideological revolution promoted by Pixar Studios in films such as Toy Story (1995), Chicken Run (2000), Finding Nemo (2003), and Robots (2005). The films rethink “class struggle, communitarian revolt and queer embodiments . . . [as well as] social relations.” Halberstam points out that “[i]n many of those ‘queer fairytales’ romance gives way to friendship, individuation gives way to collectivity and ‘successful’ heterosexual coupling is upended, displaced and challenged by queer contact.”3 In Ratatouille, the romance between Linguini and Colette appears anecdotal compared to the relationship between Linguini and Remy. Cooking, an activity usually associated with the most traditional aspects of French culture becomes a metaphor of queering because the rat-cook promotes mixing and mixture in and out of the kitchen. The kitchen team is a melting pot of marginal individuals of different nationalities and ethnicities. The relation between the ideology of the “melting pot” and French universalism and cuisine, however, is a complex one. Horst, a German ex-convict, claims to have robbed the second largest bank in France, created a hole in the ozone layer over Avignon, and murdered a man with his thumb. Larousse, named after the famous dictionary, smuggled arms for the Resistance but nobody knows precisely which

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Resistance. Lalo, who could be Caribbean, left his home at age twelve to become a circus acrobat. Pompidou, whose name comically references a former president of the Fifth Republic, is a compulsive gambler who was banned from casinos in Las Vegas and Monaco. The opportunistic Skinner, whose gesticulations and funny faces have been modeled on Louis de Funès, looks North African. Linguini is a an illegitimate Franco-Italian boy and he cannot be separated from the invisible “little chef.” The kitchen team is a queer type of community. All the members of this diverse community of border-crossers and marginals share a passion for French cuisine; furthermore, their professional activity is also associated with subversion and marginality: “We are artists, pirates. We are more than cooks,” says Colette. But what kind of “pirates” are the cooks and what type of subversion are we talking about here? Is the queering of the team and its preference for mixing politically queer? Is not French cuisine the culinary equivalent of French universalism, which stipulates that anyone can become French as long as one adopts French culture? Is the book Anyone Can Cook a recipe for a more traditional form of integration? A look at the emblematic dish chosen to represent Remy’s triumph reveals that his “ratatouille” is also the site of ambiguities and contradictory signals regarding the nation and its communities. The ratatouille of the film is more than a typical French recipe such as Veau Marengo that might connote French gastronomy on the international scene. Ratatouille was obviously chosen because it includes the word “rat,” but it also serves a more symbolic purpose. The Introduction to Dakin’s book Ratatouille: The Guide to Remy’s World suggests that the ratatouille is capable of queering the opposition between the “high” and “low” kitchen: There’s a dish in France that’s so popular it’s eaten in thousands of homes every day. Its name? Well, that’s the funny part, it doesn’t have a posh name that will make you stop and wonder about what you’re really eating . . . It’s a kind of vegetable stew that even looks a bit ordinary— like leftovers. But sometimes great things don’t come with a fancy name, or a special reputation. Sometimes they don’t even look that great. But despite all that, when you really get to know them, they can be kind of special. Kind of like a rat named Remy . . . (7)

The emphasis on simplicity, leftovers, and the refusal to define “great things” as what is “posh” and “fancy” is also present in Trésor de la langue française, which, under “ratatouille,” proposes:

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A– Dish made of various ingredients cut in pieces and cooked together. B– 1/Dated. Stew (bad) . . . roughly cooked. 2/ Fig. : heterogeneous mixing. Synon. Salad, hodgepodge. Life is made of a damned ratatouille of ingredients. (Arnoux, Rhône, 203). Etymologically, the word would come from a crossing between “tatouiller” which means “to stir, to handle a lot; to spill in the mud” and “ratouiller,” “to make murky, to shake, to stir; to make dirty.”4

The definition suggests that the distance between “mud,” “filth,” and ratatouille is no greater than between the garbage boy and his chef d’oeuvre. The film suggests that the culinary work of art implies the transformation of what the norm treats as discarded material. The “ratatouille” is associated with mixing and murkiness, and it is no coincidence that it is cooked by the “rejects” of society (a rat, an illegitimate son, a group of marginals). From within France, however, ratatouille was not recognized as typically or authentically French (regardless of whether Frenchness here is queer or not). François Simon, the food critic of Le Figaro who is thought to have inspired the character of Anton Ego5 saw the “ratatouille” of the film as a miserable rosette of eggplant, zucchinis and tomatoes (in the posh style of American new cuisine of 1997–1998), far from this delightfully stewed and luscious ratatouille we know. We then think, rather unabashedly, that any rat could become a movie director. (Simon, “Drôlement”)

The critic has a point even if we disagree with the implications of his “we” (“we,” the French). After all, what the movie crew calls a ratatouille is a “confit Bayaldi,” invented by French chef Michel Guérard in 1976, and reinterpreted by Thomas Keller, the American chef of the French Laundry (California) and main consultant for the animated movie. This American smoothed-out version of ratatouille does not emphasize the “murky” aspects of the dish and presents us with a very clean version of what is supposed to be a popular stew and a figurative “melting pot.” On the other hand, if the Americanized version of the French ratatouille is not as queer as its supposedly more authentic original, the representation of how cuisine relates to communities constitutes an ambiguous homage to contemporary France: It is constructed as a country that welcomes foreigners and protects gamblers but is, at the same time, stubbornly incapable of adapting to modernity and globalization. In a partly deleted scene, Gusteau, forced to market frozen food, complains about the fact his “foie gras pockets” don’t sell. When Skinner then

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recommends microwave burritos, he retorts: “I hate microwave burritos . . . [They] are not Gusteau. They are not even French!” Skinner proposes “corn dog puppies,” presented as “cheap sausages dipped in butter and deep fried. You know, American,” adding, in order to convince his boss: “Well, we wouldn’t actually call them ‘corn dog puppies.’ We make it appear gourmet. Better meat, change the shape, give it a pretentious name and charge triple.” Gusteau, in despair, then asks, “What has happened to us, Skinner?” And Skinner replies, “We woke up.” But this kind of unwanted awakening will not last: When Linguini is declared the heir to the restaurant, the team makes a bonfire of all the advertisements for frozen food, an ambiguous gesture that can be interpreted as an anti-American statement concerning frozen fast food or as a critique of the French’s inability to democratize goods reserved for an elite. According to Ratatouille, France never woke up, reflecting both its charm and its limitations. Paris, the home of this queer cuisine experiment, is a city that ignores modernity. “In Paris, nothing feels new,” declares Sharon Calahan, the director of photography. This “feeling,” shared by the movie director, corresponds to the portrayed image of the city. Recent monuments such as the Tour Montparnasse, La Défense, or the Centre Pompidou have been erased from the picture. The timeframe has been manipulated so that it becomes impossible to date the plot. Television sets, mopeds, buses, and cars (the famous Citroën DS or 2CV), distinctive of the 1950s or 1960s look similar, but license-plates bear the European sticker created in 1992. Colette also rides a state-of-the-art motorcycle. The aforementioned ideological equation between Ratatouille, French universalism, and “the melting pot,” which contradicts the emerging queerness of Remy, is then layered with the ambiguity produced by the rendition of Paris as a sort of hodgepodge of objects whose historical provenance jumbles time periods while accessing a familiar French anti-Americanism. This weird time warp creates a feeling of a timeless city of romance that matches Remy’s ideal of the sacred capital of gastronomy: The capital is too perfect to be true, just as the final ratatouille in the movie is a clean version of the original “bad stew.” This cliché is not only an American bias, inherited from hundreds of photographs and films, from An American in Paris (1951) and The Aristocats (1970) to French Kiss (1995). I would argue that it is also an image that France sometimes likes to give of itself, in films such as Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001).6 As Ratatouille well exemplifies, France is stuck in an uncomfortable position. Its heritage—food, fashion, historical architecture, and way of life— attracts 45 million tourists every year but at the same time also curbs the

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expansion of the city, which has not changed its boundaries since 1860 and is in danger of being transformed into a huge outdoor museum. French cuisine does not escape this pattern. On February 23, 2008, at the Salon de l’Agriculture in Paris, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed to list French gastronomy as part of the Unesco World Intangible Heritage (in French, it sounds a bit different, “intangible” being translated into “immatériel,” which is not the first image that comes to mind when we talk about cuisine). He declared: “We have the best gastronomy in the world,” adding, without the slightest irony, “well, from our point of view.” The question that would probably be worth addressing is whether the old provençale murky ratatouille is truly compatible with the ministry of “identité française.”

Coda On March 5, 2009, I was to give a lecture on Ratatouille and queer theory at UCLA. An announcement for this lecture was posted on the site of the French Embassy, but with the wrong title and using an old abstract circulating on the net, summarizing a 20-minute lecture that I had given on the same topic for the conference “Rhetoric of the Other” held at the University of Urbana–Champagne (Illinois) in March 2008. In this abstract, I had stated that Ratatouille “could also be read as the story of a coming-out—not out of the closet but out of the chef ’s hat—where Remy embodies the symbolic lonely gay” (my emphasis). This piece of information was taken up on a blog of the L.A. Times, where the lecture was presented, more directly, as a demonstration of Ratatouille being “the story of a homosexual comingout” (Hallock 2009). Within two days, the allegorical became real, and Remy a drag queen. In less than 24 hours, not only was the information published in USA Today, but hundreds of scandalous comments from all over the world were published on the web: “Ridiculous,” “outrageous,” “the professor is over reaching” were among the nicest comments, while the “gay lobby” was associated with “pedophilia” and French people, as usual, were portrayed as obsessed and corrupted by “theory.” Some asked that the UCLA French Department close and be replaced by the English Department—which was a risky proposition, considering the native language and country of origin of queer theory. The most perceptive blogger noticed that there was the word “rat” in “Murat,” a point that I willingly concede. Needless to say: Nobody had read or heard, even could have read or heard, the lecture that had not yet been delivered, and had never been published.

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What this anecdote teaches us, besides confirming the frightening power of the web and the disproportionate consequences of a tiny series of posted errors and editorial shortcuts, is that applying queer theory as a metonymic method and using it as a tool of analysis remains widely misunderstood. First, the meaning of “queer” is still limited to “gay,” spuriously othered to the “French” and disturbingly connected to pedophilia, and not assimilated as a word designating people who are escaping the traditional boundaries of sex, race, and gender or heteronormative society, regardless of their sexuality. Second, and more disturbing, gay/queer thought applied to children’s entertainment still remains associated with a threat, a shocking moral “abuse,” and a kind of hijacking of movies that are, as a blogger said, “only cute.” Comic strips, cartoons, animated movies are a great observatory to understand what kind of a world is proposed to today’s children. I suppose bloggers would agree that an open world, with different approaches and diverse ways of living, is preferable to a univocal civilization.

Pathos as Queer Sociality in Contemporary European Visual Culture: François Ozon’s Time to Leave Emma Wilson

This essay approaches queer through the issues of pathos, compassion and emotions. I argue here that European visual culture has, in recent years, allowed new access to, and connections with, pathos and the emotions mapped through visual and literary allusion. In Anglo-American queer theory, in particular in the wake of the AIDS crisis, pathos has roused caution and irritation. Lee Edelman writes: “Compassion can be a touchy subject, touching, as it does, on what touches the heart by seeming to put us in touch with something other than ourselves while leaving us open, in the process, to being read as an easy touch” (67). Edelman finds in compassion, or pathos, precisely a breakdown of relationality and sociality, and a compulsory move toward shared feeling. He writes: “For just as compassion confuses our own emotions with another’s, making it kissing cousin to its morbid obverse, paranoia, so it allows no social space that isn’t already its own, no ground on which to stand outside its all-encompassing reach” (67). My argument moves very differently here as I find, in a European context, and in European cinema, means of imagining pathos, and compassion, as a responsive, open, and prescient mode of sociality. I contend,

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indeed, that pathos, as re-invested in recent European cinema, offers a specter of a new, queer sociality. Inspirational for my work has been the discussion of injurability and grievability offered by Judith Butler in her 2004 volume, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, and I will have recourse to extensive discussion of her text in the material that follows. Precarious Life, while apparently universal in its appeal and in the ethical questions it considers, is expressly written from a North American positioning, and in part in response to military offensives, and media occlusions, in the context of the Iraq War. Taking Butler’s work outside this context, I consider the broader implications of her thinking about pathos for sociality, and for queer sociality in particular. The cultural material examined here explores sociality in a specific context: that of Western European society and its artistic representations of love and mourning. Where the reception of queer theory and its political imperatives has generally been considered to be late-coming in Europe, I argue here that evidence from a range of representations suggests a readiness, in some European contexts, to envisage the forms of sociality that pathos, read queerly, newly affords. These forms of sociality, in representation, involve the embrace of, and dialogue with, some of the most culturally exclusive, and aesthetically resonant, forms of European culture. New, European, modes of queer are adumbrated beyond specific national boundaries, yet apart from, and in contra-distinction to, queasiness about compassion, and sentimental touching and feeling, arising in Anglo-American queer theory. Emblematic in this context is the work of European queer director François Ozon, whose film Time to Leave (2005) I consider in detail here. While Ozon has been most frequently discussed as a French auteur, his work extends beyond this national cinema context in a number of ways. Indeed this feature of Ozon’s filmmaking may set him apart from some other current French queer directors, such as Christophe Honoré, André Téchiné, Olivier Ducastel, and Jacques Martineau. (This distinction should by no means imply a hierarchy, but simply work to register Ozon’s different positioning.) As Marit Knollmueller has discussed in her doctoral thesis (2009), key points of reference for Ozon as auteur are the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in particular in his adaptation of Fassbinder’s play Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000), but also more widely in stylistic and thematic traits in his works. Key, too, has been the work of Douglas Sirk (himself bridging Europe and the United States) behind Ozon’s outlandish Huit femmes (2002) and his English-language adaptation of the novel by Elizabeth Tay-

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lor, Angel (2007). Debts to a pan-European art house cinema are also felt in Ozon’s casting of international actresses such as Charlotte Rampling (in Under the Sand [2000] and Swimming Pool [2003]) and in his structural tribute to a film such as Pasolini’s Theorem (1968) in his Sitcom (1998). The diversity of Ozon’s debts and tributes suggests that he claims a place with relation to European and international cinema culture more broadly. The points of reference that I explore here invoke a further stratum of European visual and literary culture, specifically statuary of the Italian Renaissance on the one hand, and on the other, the literary explorations of mourning and the art of dying found in a range of filmic, photographic, and literary works, and in most concentrated form in À la recherche du temps perdu. It is through these points of reference, and recourse to high artistic and literary culture, in a queer pan-European context, that Ozon addresses the issues of sociality and pathos I draw attention to here. Works by Ozon perceived as queer are treated at length in Nick ReesRoberts’s French Queer Cinema. Ozon and most other directors referenced in my essay are generally identified as gay, and their work perceived as queer, though the range of sexual identities and affiliations explored in their films encourages the most porous, or all-encompassing, understanding of the term. Indeed, with particular reference to Ozon, Andrew Asibong notes that [s]exual desire as represented by Ozon is almost always multidimensional and consistently astonishing (even to its own bearer) in its capacity for boundless reinvention. . . . Far from providing new sexual appellations or diagnoses with which to circumscribe their characters’ behaviours, Ozon’s films seem instead to revel in a more thoroughly generalised blurring of the very contours of desire. (12)

In this regard, Ozon’s work bears comparison with that of the queer directors I have seen more properly to belong to traditions of French national cinema. Honoré’s films to date, with the strongest example coming in his 2004 adaptation of Georges Bataille’s La Mère, equal Ozon’s labile sexual experimentation. A director such as Téchiné embeds his explorations of queer sexualities within a network of broader imaginative family relations where, as Bill Marshall argues, “straightforward ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ appropriations are highly problematic” (81). The films of Ducastel and Martineau equally offer models of sociality that effectively queer any distinct relation between gay and straight. Yet these directors do not stretch their thinking about porous boundaries in identification across national boundaries in Europe, as does Ozon, with particular effect. The film essays

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of a director such as Vincent Dieutre tangibly focus on and champion the specifics of male homosexuality, or ‘homoness’ to borrow Bersani’s term (Bersani himself is an interlocutor in Leçons de ténèbres [2000]), and this sets him apart from Ozon. But in other ways, in their tropes of journeying and passage, and their moves between locations (Utrecht, Naples, and Rome in Leçons de ténèbres), his films can be aligned with the boundary-crossing, pan-European, high art aesthetic I suggest Ozon identifies as queer in his films. In this essay, I argue that the blurring of the contours of desire, and the crossing of ever-permeable boundaries between homosexuality and heterosexuality, are aligned with an aesthetic that looks beyond the boundaries of national cinemas and cultures. Ozon’s art identifies itself with a high art tradition across Europe, thus defining a queer aesthetic markedly in contrast to Anglo-American queer representations. Permeability across sexual and national (artistic) boundaries carries particular force in Ozon’s films, making them queer in a political as well as sexual sense. With reference to Time to Leave, I use queer to describe the sexual identity of the protagonist, the men he sleeps with and the sex acts he watches. Queer, as that which is outside the straight norm and contests its hegemony, is associated also with the fuller range of non-normative desires and emotions the film conjures. It is in this broader field of queer relationality that Ozon adds his most innovative contribution to European cinema, equaling the affective work and unsettling of gender and sexual identity categories of another European director such as Pedro Almodóvar. The unlikely means used to achieve gender and sexual trouble, and the reinvention of the affective and erotic dynamics of European cinema, are what I describe here as queer pathos. The term pathos needs some defense in the context of Anglo-American discussion of queer sexualities, as I have already implied. Pathos appears a number of times in Rees Roberts’s volume, but in disparaging tones. ReesRoberts speaks, for example, of “the baggage of gay pathos” (94), the “trap of pathos” (103), and “the pitfalls of pathos” (107); he reacts strongly against the “pathos and martyrdom dominating AIDS visual fiction” (105). One of his aims through sections of his book is to question and contest the association of queer sexuality with the moribund and the diseased. He champions different modes of representation of AIDS as found, for example, in the “bitter-sweet camp” (112) of Ducastel and Martineau. Rees-Roberts also identifies a trend of films, in which he includes Time to Leave and Son frère (Patrice Chéreau, 2004), that he describes as “not-about-AIDS” films, films that address mortality and grief, and apparently conjure the specter

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of AIDS-related illness, while failing or refusing to represent the illness in any social or political context. His specification is useful to me because I, too, am interested in “not-about-AIDS” films, yet my perspective is rather different. I am concerned with those European films that explore a queer perspective on suffering and mortality, yet do not attach these specifically to AIDS or AIDS-related illness. What I identify in these films is a bid to explore the possibilities for affect and emotion in (queer) cinema in an era where AIDS is not the lone, or even perhaps immediate, point of reference in thinking mortality for queer-identified subjects. This is a trend made possible in European cinema perhaps precisely because such cinema has been less concerned with political affirmation of queer identity, and so less invested in the pathologization of pathos as such. My move here is to argue that pathos itself may be political (for Ozon specifically, but also potentially for other European artists), and open possibilities for a queer (non-normative) sociality. Pathos, as conceived by Rees-Roberts, is apolitical and even exploitative. He argues: “The objective of the strand of queer pathos standard in French AIDS representation is not simply the philosophical penchant for universal suffering and apolitical art; it is also concerned with financial profit” (113); he goes on to write about the commercial exploitation of “AIDS-as-art” (113). My aim in thinking queer pathos is to argue that the emotions, and this particular strand of emotion in representation, may be used precisely as the basis for a different politics. This different investment in pathos, emotion, and relationality I see as specifically European in its current manifestations. Giuliana Bruno, in her Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, draws an affective map of Europe through the imagined and sensory journey offered in the continent’s art, architecture, and cinema. Ozon, and others, show how queer is already part of this affective map (where gender is more manifestly Bruno’s concern). In contemporary cinema, pathos and its passions may be queer sexually, affectively, and politically. The politics of queer pathos, in whatever lavish dramatic forms his films choose, is a point of experimentation for Ozon. I argue that this experimentation cuts across gender and sexual categorizations to rethink sociality and the place of pathos within it, beyond normative borders. A risk this piece runs is that I write as a female critic moved by, and appropriating, representations of queer outside my range of experience. Riskier still, and more revelatory perhaps, is the fact that the pathos I identify, in Ozon in particular, finds its expression in queer interaction with female characters who embody certain sensory and affective meanings (of protection, nurture, and sensuality). Yet if queer troubles fixed identifications and

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hegemonic inscriptions, perhaps its films may also open onto partial, affective, and appropriative readings (such as I offer here) and newly imagined affective relations. As a European reader of North American queer theory and a female scholar of European literature and culture, I am also professionally invested in a certain border-crossing reading of queer in Europe. My readings, and more importantly the works of the theorists and artists I draw on, aim to open up and to re-imagine a range of identifications, gaining imaginative breadth from recognition that differently identified and culturally located individuals may find themselves bound up in emotional and erotic interaction. This interaction, a response to the other, an access of shared feeling, may yet, as I argue, have some political purpose. To defend my interest in queer pathos I turn to the work of Judith Butler and specifically Precarious Life. This volume may be aligned with other Anglo-American studies, notably Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought and Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion, which champion the necessary imbrication of emotion with judgment and politics. Of these writers, Butler goes furthest in envisaging the political uses of affect, in particular in responses to mortality and loss. These are the questions, indeed, which return for Butler as a queer theorist and cultural critic today, within a North American context. These are some of the questions from Anglophone queer theory and feminist thinking that I think can most usefully be brought into contact with European film. In both Precarious Life and her subsequent volume Frames of War, Butler thinks through questions about when a life is grievable. Her opening move, which I endorse entirely here, is to “take injurability and aggression as two points of departure for political life” (Precarious Life xii). Butler argues: “That we can be injured, that others can be injured, that we are subject to death at the whim of another, are all reasons for both fear and grief ” (xii). In a post–September 11 U.S. context, one of Butler’s major concerns is to consider “what, politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war” (xii). While this context is integral to the politics of her piece, its implications are far from limited to this. Here I am taking her work beyond its context to consider injurability and mortality as they are experienced in a different range of affective lives. Butler contests: Some lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and a grievable death? (xvi–xv)

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Butler’s primary concern is with aggression, and situations where the subject may be killed and her or his life not mourned, nor framed in representation as grievable. Her project calls for a reimagining and reframing of our understanding of state operations of power and representation. As intimated, her work on violence, mourning, and politics has opened broader questions about loss and its possible political and ethical consequences. She makes specific connections between her argument about grievability and the question of sexual and gender identities, writing: Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life? Despite our differences in location and history, my guess is that it is possible to appeal to a “we,” for all of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous “we” of us all. And if we have lost, then it follows that we have had, that we have desired and loved, that we have struggled to find the conditions for our desire. We have all lost in recent decades from AIDS, but there are other losses that afflict us, from illness and from global conflict; and there is the fact as well that women and minorities, including sexual minorities, are, as a community, subjected to violence, exposed to its possibility, if not its realization. (20)

Butler looks across different losses here, aligning questions of violence suffered through prejudice and discrimination with other forms of social and political disenfranchisement, and the personal losses of AIDS. Part of the power of her argument comes in its use of identitarian politics. She acknowledges that certain identity categories carry with them risk of injury, and the risk of prejudice, which refuses grievability; yet she avoids what Zˇizˇek has described as “the moralizing mathematics of guilt and specificity” (51). (For Zˇizˇek, post–September 11, it was important to recognize that “the terrifying death of each individual is absolute and incomparable” [51–52].) Opening out her ideas about injurability, Butler contends with its affective as well as political consequence. She explores how loss and injury are bound up with attachment, desire, and political affirmation: “Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure” (Precarious Life 20). The implication here that injurability underlies our experiences of intimacy and love leads me closer to my concern for pathos, queer or otherwise. One disarming, and prospective, virtue of Butler’s project is the way it pro-

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poses political dimensions to grief and mourning. She writes reflectively on mourning, acknowledging that she does not know when mourning is successful, and reminding us that Freud, too, changed his mind on the subject (20). Despite this due caution, her volume conjures a vision of grief as a transformative experience, as she writes: Many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation and is, in that sense, depoliticizing. But I think it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility. (22)

There is no easy sense here that mourning is productive, yet Butler remains open to the possibility of revelation and material change, whatever its pain: “maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute who we are, ties or bonds that compose us” (22). In words that echo the concern with the construction of identity through identification and performance of her earlier writing, Butler reflects here on the ways in which loss and vulnerability open us to our own composite and relational existence, our involvement with others, and our possible invocation of that involvement, that existence in community, in our relations to others. As Butler puts it simply: “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something” (23). Critical here for the notion of queer pathos, and the readings that follow, is the sense that grief and its passion may be revelatory, particularly of our bonds to each other. Time and again in Precarious Life, Butler asks if there is something to be gained from grieving, from “tarrying with grief ” (30). She questions further: “If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another?” (30). These are questions I carry across to Time to Leave. As we have seen in discussion of French Queer Cinema, a fear about mawkishness and martyrdom, about the association of homosexuality with mortality, seems to underpin critical wariness about pathos as mode in queer representations. I ask here whether pathos in turn may, as Butler hopes, return us to a sense of common vulnerability and collective responsibility. Might affect and emotion in film, their indulgence and reimagining, open

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up different ways of thinking queer? And how is this associated specifically with queer representations in Europe? What is the influence of a different cultural and artistic tradition in the contemporary European context? Ozon speaks disarmingly about the decision to make Time to Leave in an English-language interview on the U.K. DVD edition. He locates Time to Leave in relation to his previous feature, Under the Sand (2000), noting that this was already a film about death. He speaks about his specific interest in making films about the complexity of mourning, about the psychology of characters facing death, and about how they try to deal with their loss. This fascination led him to feel that one day he should make a film about his own death. He goes so far as to cite as inspiration medical tests he had had the year previous to the making of Time to Leave, his fear at that time, and the many scenarios he had in his mind. While he was cleared medically, he recounts that the scenarios (I assume both fearful and theatrical) remained in his mind after the results, and took form in the film he made. In this account, the film becomes an imaginative record of how death might have been faced. Not testimonial as such, the film in its conception and handling of its subject is more strangely an attempt to forestall a reality that has not yet come to pass. In Time to Leave, Romain (Melvil Poupaud) is a young, beautiful fashion photographer glimpsed initially in his working environment. Early experiences of malaise and blackout in the film lead quickly to the diagnosis of terminal cancer. From this point on, the film accompanies Romain in the last months of his life. Ozon suggests (in the interview cited) that he did not intend to make a film about medical care, but rather a film about death. In this regard, information about Romain’s condition remains fairly sparse in the film. We learn in scenes with his doctor that his cancer has metastasized (“s’est généralisé” in the original French) but that it has proved impossible to determine which was the original tumor. The film in this sense offers no diagnostic or causational logic to Romain’s disease, choosing to focus instead on its telos. This refusal of origins or medical etiology is incidentally significant for the film’s queer treatment of its subject and its mode of response to a death sentence outside normative medical and familial networks. Romain’s illness, as he makes sense of it and lives with it, is reason-less yet irrevocable. Despite the encouragement of his doctor, Romain refuses any medical treatment (and the film makes clear the slight chance of survival such treatment would offer him). He refuses, too, any engagement with his family and denies them knowledge of his illness; the only family member to whom he speaks is his grandmother ( Jeanne Moreau).

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Rather than acting as a film about cancer, or even specifically as a film about terminal illness, Time to Leave acts in effect as a type of thoughtexperiment about how to lead one’s life in the face of death. It is a film that, in its structure, incorporates a number of literal journeys, and on these journeys stops at a service station on a highway are significant to its plot. It is also a film that apparently runs chronologically from diagnosis through to premature death, though memory, wish-fulfillment, and fantasy at times disrupt this teleology. Yet it significantly avoids the expected narratives and outcomes of either the terminal illness subgenre in narrative cinema or the narratives of journeying in medical discourse, as exemplified currently on the CURE website: Cancer is a journey—both medical and emotional. You leave the life you know as soon as you hear the words “you have cancer,” not knowing what lies ahead for your body or your soul. While each journey is unique, there are universal stops and turns for every cancer patient and caregiver/co-survivor. Understanding this journey will help you maneuver the obstacles and prepare for various possibilities as you juggle new information for yourself and your family or community. (“Where are you on the cancer journey?”)

Eschewing such confidently worded accounts, Time to Leave exists rather as a free-wheeling, inquisitive, and sometimes deluded film about the forms of connection, comfort, and disaffection that may yet be selected while facing death. Ozon says that he was inspired to make a film about his own death. Under the Sand, equally curious about mourning and unpredictable in its investigation thereof, takes a very different figure, Marie (Charlotte Rampling), a middle-aged female academic, as its bereaved subject. The admission on the director’s part of his own speculative involvement in the later film is intriguing. While commentators have remarked on the physical resemblance between Ozon and Poupaud, to see the film as in any serious sense autobiographical is to miss the point: Ozon explores the management of death in a broader and prospective context. I have remarked elsewhere, “Time to Leave is novel as a film about illness, with a gay protagonist, that does not make AIDS its overt subject” (18). As we have seen, Rees-Roberts locates the film more specifically within what he describes as “not-about-AIDS” cinema, arguing, indeed, that “Chéreau’s Son frère (2004) and Ozon’s Le Temps qui reste (2005) both maintain a conscious silence on AIDS” (112). This silence on AIDS, which on one level may seem a disavowal, opens for me the question of whether AIDS must or should be a point of refer-

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ence in thinking queer and terminal illness. On one level, it must be, in recognition of the excessive impact of the illness in our (or any) community: as Butler acknowledges, as cited previously, “We have all lost in recent decades from AIDS” (Precarious Life 20). AIDS has also had an extraordinary and moving effect on memorial and testimonial artistic practice, in the form of diaries, video testimony, photography, fiction, film, quilts, and other modes of representation, to the extent that representations of intimacy and mortality in subsequent years must surely be marked by this palliative and commemorative art. If I said previously that Time to Leave does not take AIDS as its overt subject, by no means do I mean to preclude acknowledgement of the film’s connections to the iconography of the suffering male body in AIDS photography and cinema (which flourished particularly in the work of Hervé Guibert), or acknowledgement of its imbrication of intimations of mortality with newly chosen sexual intimacy (as prefigured in Cyril Collard’s autobiographical film, in part about AIDS, Les Nuits fauves [1992]). AIDS representations must be, in some senses, always behind Time to Leave. But, rather than remain silent about AIDS, or fail to address this subject, the film implies instead, I think, that AIDS is not the only illness with which queers contend (Butler herself continues the text cited: “[B]ut there are other losses that afflict us, from illness and from global conflict” [Precarious Life 20]). The location of mortality with relation to cancer in Time to Leave, rather than AIDS, appears to reflect both a realistic perspective on mortality rates, and on the current prognostics of and with the illness. There is certainly no room for complacency, either in the queer community or within the global community, but in the twenty-first century, in a Western European context, living with (not dying from) AIDS would be a more likely narrative. Giving Romain cancer, and a metastasized cancer with no located source, Ozon severs any obscene or moralizing correlation (to borrow Zˇizˇek’s words) between sexual identity, sexual practice, and a death sentence (55). Romain’s death sentence has no logic or causality, no sequence as such. Any sequence to the events of the film that unfolds is expressly of his choosing and his determination as he faces what he sees as certain death. This existential reckoning, and autonomous self-determination, is one of the modes of facing death that Ozon apparently favors. Romain faces death whether or not he is queer. He does not face it because he is queer, though he may face it differently because he is queer (and in Europe). Indeed, this I see as one of the questions that the film opens out, or poses ethically, with, strategically, no fixed conclusion. In asking how he would approach his own death, Ozon implicitly considers how

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there may be different approaches to death and questions how this imagining of death may itself be queered. Romain faces a death unconnected with his sexuality, yet he faces it through the affective and erotic frames of his sexual identification. Ozon explores identification with Romain in his new-found vulnerability, and in the responses he makes to it. In his filmmaking, he seeks echoes for Romain’s experiences and responses in a range of artistic and literary reference, as we shall see further. In keeping with his interest in crossing boundaries between queer and straight sexualities and social identifications, Ozon shows Romain in professional and familial contexts, as well as in bars and clubs, and in sexual relations with his sometimes boyfriend Sacha (Christian Sengewald). Notably, Ozon creates a globalized European context, where Romain has a German boyfriend, and speaks English with his clients and models on his photography shoots. Ozon sketches a context for Romain that is plausible in imagining the differing milieux he inhabits and their differing relation to his sexual identification; it is a geographical and cultural context of permeable boundaries. Romain is seen in a series of heterosexual settings, but he also queers those contexts specifically in moments that show the literal brushing up together and jostling of different sexualities and subjective worlds. Romain’s sexual identification is seen (in Butler’s constructive sense) to trouble his relation to his father, whose cheek he strokes in an exchange as his father drives him home after a family gathering. It equally troubles his relation to his doctor to whom Romain admits that he, the doctor, has figured sexually in his dreams (as have Romain’s family members and his childhood self, as Ozon recalls the opened family sexualities of a film such as Sitcom [1998]).1 The heterosexual family does not remain intact in contact with Romain. While it figures in his fantasies and is a focus in some of the processes through which he reorders and rethinks his life as he faces mortality, the film does not find solace in the immediate family or comfort there. Instead, in another context, Time to Leave explores a different affective bond and one that is particularly disjunctive given Romain’s disaffection through the film, and distinct in its appeal to what I’m calling queer pathos. In a fascinating reading of Time to Leave, Andrew Asibong criticizes the film’s treatment of its subject, writing: “As a meditation on the imminence of death it is disappointingly superficial: various attempts to convey visual indices of its protagonist’s proximity to annihilation—images of withered flowers, the heady confusion of the fainting spell—are especially jarring in their triteness” (105). Yet, despite his apparent disappointment in the film, Asibong also writes strongly of its analysis of interpersonal relations, argu-

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ing: “Romain’s relations with others in the film seem impossible to channel into anything as ‘normal’ as conventional friendship, love or kinship, mainly because they seem simultaneously over-intimate and alienated, ‘too close’ at the same time as being ‘not close enough’ ” (105). Asibong describes “a rather complicated and offputting form of solipsism, a cinematic vision that appears to have given up on all possibility of genuine connection across a community of subjects” (106). This reading tends to overlook the connection that is forged between Romain and his grandmother, Laura ( Jeanne Moreau). I see this interaction as a source and nestling place of the film’s attention to queer pathos, of its references outward to European cultural artifacts, and of its broader question of connection to others in the face of vulnerability that Butler explores. The scenes with the grandmother, lasting just over ten minutes, are at the heart of the film structurally and provide the space in which the feelings and attention hidden elsewhere are allowed expression.2 Crucial to the scenes’ success is the presence of Jeanne Moreau who carries with her the aura of her long film career and her high cultural value.3 For Asibong, “Every element of the film [Time to Leave] seems to function as a pallid, wan and wilting version of something that existed elsewhere in a brighter form” (104). The observation may be acute for the film as a whole, but with particular respect to Laura, and her incarnation by Jeanne Moreau, I disagree. Moreau’s embodiment of Laura speaks of beauty, sensuality, and serenity even in her own approach to death. Her loveliness, and the comfort and kinship it brings for Romain, dominate here. Despite her aging and fragility, it seems for the moments of the film that Moreau has never known a brighter or more animate form. I am interested in what these scenes with Jeanne Moreau allow and what they uncover for the film. Rather than travel to Japan for a photo shoot, Romain drives to his grandmother’s house in rural France. The opening sequence of their scenes together shows Romain and Laura preparing dinner. Laura is seen first from behind in her kitchen. A window above her stove shows bottles of oil and preserves, offering a Proustian image of leaves suspended in liquid and translucent glass illuminated in sunlight. The pictorial qualities and muted tones of the shot recall too the still-life paintings of Giorgio Morandi. In this domestic space, Laura questions her grandson about his decision to reveal nothing of his illness to his parents. The scene begins in medias res. We do not witness Romain’s revelation that he is terminally ill, nor do we witness Laura’s immediate response. Romain is not even visible in the initial shot, although Laura addresses him beyond the frame. Frequently through the ensuing scenes, the two protagonists either appear

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alone, speaking to an absent other, or together in the frame. Ozon largely refuses the logic of shot / reverse shot editing and the suturing of the film thus with responses between self and other. In this way, he refuses the illusion of exchange and answered dialogue, the illusion of being “in touch” (to recall Edelman) that cinema fosters through this effect. The exchanges shown here are both more tentative, but more open in the pathos of their appeal to the other, or the viewer. In a subsequent fluid shot, the camera follows Laura as she crosses the kitchen to sit beside Romain, with a white basin for salad on the table in front of her (the composition of the shot is echoed and reversed in a later framing where we see Laura holding another womblike bowl as she sits in conversation with Romain). Both protagonists now appear in the frame, talking at the table, the naturalism of the scene enhanced, and its emotion deflected, as they prepare food together. The image is still pictorially composed, as the reddish orange of Romain’s sweater is perfectly reflected in the tomatoes on the table in front of him, and as the basil they cut draws in the green of the exterior glimpsed through the windows that brighten and aerate the interior scene. As the protagonists talk, Romain voices his reluctance to tell his family about his illness, his sense that his mother would smother him and that his sister would baby him like one of her children. His refusal to be the pathetic object of female attention makes me look afresh at this scene with Laura and the way it offers him a different, and therefore attractive, form of accompaniment. Laura asks Romain questions about his refusal of his family’s knowledge, asking about the regret and guilt they will feel when he has died. She does not condone his actions here, but stands instead as an interlocutor allowing him to give expression to his thoughts. She prompts him, yet barely attempts to influence his actions (only asking once if he would reconsider chemotherapy for her sake). When he says that he won’t be around to see his family’s response, she replies immediately that this is “infantile and selfish.” Romain’s actions and choices are laid bare, but whether or not they are judged is open to question. Indeed the possibility of judging him fairly is put into question in these scenes. From the kitchen, the film cuts to the dining room. Laura has changed her clothes and appears more seductive, and so more complicit with Romain. Her radiant beauty, her soft honey-colored hair, her lips as Romain lights her a cigarette, speak of all the sensual, heart-stopping images of Jeanne Moreau in earlier films. In this dinner scene, cigarette smoke creates an aura in the air around them as Laura coaxes from Romain further details about the silence he has kept about his illness. Against his emotional

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closure, she counters: “There’s no shame in inspiring pity or sympathy [translation altered]” (“il n’y a pas de honte à faire pitié et à attendrir”). The words are critical to the film, I think, and certainly to my argument here. Time to Leave unfolds as a film that questions the qualities of pity and sympathy, the shame or otherwise of pathos, and envisages the possibility of tenderness and intimacy without mawkishness or sentimentality. The scenes with Jeanne Moreau question this equation explicitly in their dialogue as they question it wordlessly for the film in their acts and gestures. Laura questions Romain and listens to him, but does not lecture him or let her own emotion overcome her ability to hear him and respond to him. She asks him why he has chosen to tell her alone that he is ill. Already the answer to this is palpable in the adequacy and generosity of her responses to him, but his answer to her takes a different tack. He says he has told her because she is like him and she too is facing death. We see a reaction shot where surprise, even momentary recoil, is registered, before Laura smiles again with irony and tenderness. Romain’s revelation has a certain leveling effect on the exchange. Laura is no less protective to Romain as the scenes continue, but their intimacy now seems dependent on their shared vulnerability: Her death sentence is aligned with his. On one level, this parity brings tranquility, but the film never assumes shared feeling between its protagonists. They observe each other and gently unsettle each other in their conversation in its shifts from humor to sheer grief. With levity Laura says that she will die in perfect health (with all her vitamins and supplements). The proximity of her death, which Romain has avowed, is something he seems to foreclose and deny as the scene continues, but Laura does not let him shy away from the knowledge that now exists between them, avowing in her turn that she would like to die at the same time as him (“I’d like to slip away with you”). She actualizes and eroticizes the implications of the common condition that has brought them together, wishing that they might go so far as to accompany one another in death. After she has said this, they face each other in silence, and Ozon now uses shot / reverse shot editing not to suture a conversation, but to juxtapose each silent protagonist with the other. This is the moment of emotional intrusion in the film. Romain here weeps, as he has not previously, and the film cuts to a beautiful image of him nestled against Laura’s shoulder. The image recalls the religious iconography of the Pietà, in the incline and vulnerability of Romain’s body, and the moving incongruity of an adult man lying cradled like a child. In the pictorial reference, Ozon wordlessly recalls the pitié Laura has spoken of previously. The cinematic image, following Romain’s tears, suggests bra-

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zenly that the film itself will not be ashamed of its indulgence in pity and compassion. Ozon makes these emotions part of the ethos of the film and part of its iconography. Romain’s intimacy with Laura, in the enclosure of this rural dwelling, a memorial space he remembers from childhood holidays, opens the film to emotion, and the protagonist to the attention, and care, of another. The reference to the Pietà, in however secular a setting, also links the film and its themes to a broader tradition of representation of mortality and pathos in Western European visual culture. Pictorial and cinematic traditions of the Pietà have been brought together previously by Almodóvar in Law of Desire (1987). In this movie, film director Pablo Quintero (Eusebio Poncela) cradles the newly dead body of his lover Antonio Benitez (Antonio Banderas) in front of the burning candles, flowers, and religious icons of a temporary altarpiece. Pablo and Antonio have made love with tenderness in the last hour before Antonio commits suicide, ending a siege he has created in the apartment. As he lies prone before the altar, he is naked apart from white shorts. Pablo cradles his torso in his arms, the lifeless yet intact pale body recalling exactly the form of the Christ figure from images of the deposition and of the Pietà itself. Heart-rending love and infinite compassion are rendered in the scene in all its lavishness. Yet Almodóvar’s queer Pietà differs in two respects from Ozon’s. In the first place, it shows a man cradling his male lover, overtly queering the genders of the original icon; second, and with whatever camp irony, in the mise-en-scène of the altar it still references Roman Catholic iconography. Ozon’s queer Pietà expresses compassion and pity, impossible love, through identification across genders and generations and in a secular image that recharges the maternal energy of the original. Ozon’s Christ figure, Romain, unlike Almodóvar’s Antonio, is not yet dead, though certainly death-bound. In Romain’s position between life and death, Ozon reflects some of the ambiguities of some canonical representations of the Pietà, notably that of Michelangelo in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. As Alexander Nagel comments of the statue, and its image of death: “Christ appears to be in a deep and animated sleep, and his limbs show pulsing, prominent veins” (99). If the dead Christ is peculiarly animate, the statue also challenges time and continuity in its figuration of the Virgin Mary. Nagel continues: “In contrast to the traditional emphasis on Christ’s broken body and the Virgin’s bitter lament, Michelangelo offers an ideal, beautiful, pristine Christ in the tender embrace of an unusually youthful, beautiful, spouselike Virgin” (103). This idealized, generation-crossing, image of mother and son can be aligned with the figure of Romain and Laura constructed by

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Ozon in Time to Leave. The visual reference serves to embed Ozon’s work in a high cultural European tradition, with its sensual allure. Ozon makes of pathos a conduit of cited and queered meaning in his film, as he refigures exchange and sociality. If Laura’s closeness to death is used by Romain as a reason for his confession to her, the film does not leave it there, but uncovers alternative narratives that account for their closeness, and work to cut across strict divisions between queer and straight. As she cradles Romain, Laura speaks of her relation to his grandfather and to Romain’s own father. Her husband died while her son was young; instead of caring for the child, she ran away. She acknowledges specifically: “I couldn’t take care of him anymore.” The juxtaposition of her words and the on-screen image of unconditional care is interesting. I see no easy sense that she is reprising her life, and making it good, with Romain, however. Crucially, Laura expresses no remorse for her previous actions in abandoning her child and in pursuing her own survival in the arms of a series of lovers. She says instead: “I know I was right.” She continues: “If I hadn’t left, if I hadn’t had all those lovers, I would have died, too. You can call it selfish, but it was a survival instinct.” Where she has previously charged Romain with selfishness, choosing to abandon his family and leave them ignorant of his illness, she now raises the possibility of her own selfishness, but then absolves herself in recognition of her actions as necessary. Implicit here, I think, is a sense that if Romain is to survive the time remaining he, too, must singularly choose his own destiny, one motored by a bid for sexual intimacy in the face of annihilation. Romain chooses Laura as interlocutor because her choices mirror his. She is like him in other ways beyond their near simultaneous approach to death. She tells him that she is talking of her past with him now: “Because we’re the same.” That he should find this affirmation of his life and choices in the bosom of his family is one of the film’s nice ironies. Laura holds Romain in her arms and kisses him on his cheek and on his forehead. A close shot captures the physical intimacy, the deep, unlikely affection between the pair. This is signaled, too, in a later nocturnal scene where Romain goes into Laura’s bedroom. She is awake and offers to talk with him. He says that he just wants to sleep with her and she warns him that she sleeps naked (and we see her apparently naked under the covers, in a pearl pendant necklace). The transgression of the scene is shadowed by the earlier exchange about the two dying together. The scene seems to rehearse this possible ending for Romain in physical companionship with his grandmother (bare in her bed). As grandmother and grandson part the following morning, indeed, he continues the wistful dalliance between them as he

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says: “I wish we’d met sooner, I’d have married you” (echoing the nuptial allusions of Michelangelo’s Pietà). Passion in the strangest way is part of the queer pathos of the film. In Precarious Life, Butler has spoken of the uses of pathos in the recognition of the injurability of the other. In Time to Leave, Ozon takes a queer life as his subject, and he explores the termination of this life while breaking homophobic links between sexual identification and mortality. He opens up the possibility of the terminal-illness film, not specifically after AIDS, but in addition to, and beyond the AIDS film.4 Romain as queer subject is injurable, mortal, prey to illness, in universal terms. The use of a queer subject to approach the universal subject of mortality, and early death by cancer, perversely normalizes Romain as human subject and agent. Making him thus the injurable, suffering subject makes him, in Butler’s terms, the other to whose grievable life we are drawn to respond. In his otherness to a straight audience (if any group can ever be homogenized as such), and in his evident injurability, a figure such as Romain affords possibilities for moving beyond homophobic prejudice and opening different possibilities of interest and sympathy. The fact that the character himself is presented as initially unsympathetic allows the movement of the film to lay bare his suffering, and to engage us to feel with him all the more remarkable. It seems apt, too, that throughout the film, with the exception of the scenes with Laura, Romain appears aloof, often aggressive, and at one remove. We may be moved by his fate in the film, but he will also remain untouchable, a figure outside the reach and affective grasp of those, queer and straight, both within the film and without, who share his last months. Recognition of this is critical to the film’s ethics and consequent pathos. We are reminded that in any access of shared feeling or emotion, there are equal parts of projection and fantasy. Time to Leave is remarkable in its unabashed treatment of emotive material, in its lack of embarrassment over its approach to its subject. Its confidence extends to its handling of its intertexts, which I examine further in the last part of this essay. An obvious point of reference, in thinking the connections Time to Leave fosters with other representations, is a set of scenes between a queer protagonist and an elderly woman at the center of Ducastel and Martineau’s Drôle de Félix (2000). While in this film an elderly woman is encountered by chance, her exchanges with Félix (Sami Bouajila) have the same flirtatious and familial tone as those between Romain and Laura. While the encounter takes place in the street, it moves quickly inside into a kitchen scene (with a similar color scheme to that found in Time to Leave). The couple then moves outside and sits amidst the greenery of a

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similar garden, with familiar pink roses. Mathilde, played by veteran singer and actress Patachou, carries some of the aura of glamour and sensuality of Jeanne Moreau. There is a comparably playful yet grave exchange between the characters and even some physical tenderness. Félix spends the night at Mathilde’s house and, in a reversal of the roles in Time to Leave, she enters his bedroom to find him naked under the covers, after catching a glimpse of his body in a mirror reflection (her appreciation of him is more blatant than Laura’s of Romain, as she says that it is a long time since she’s seen a man naked). In the morning, we see Mathilde and Félix (who is HIVpositive) both taking their drugs, in an implicit comparison between two characters facing mortality (as we find also with the focus on Laura’s pills in Time to Leave). The two films rhyme with one another neatly so that we find Félix, leaving on the train, noticing a child with the same name in anticipation of Romain’s visions of his childhood self in Time to Leave and his later viewing, on a train, of a woman breast-feeding her baby. The two films are so close in their creation of these scenes indeed that it is tempting to see Time to Leave as a knowing commentary on the former representation, and as a further questioning of queerness and mortality. Drôle de Félix is significant as a film that responds to AIDS and represents a young man who is HIV-positive with a levity that shakes the AIDS film free of its association with martyrdom (as Rees-Roberts has suggested). It is then telling, too, that Ozon, five years later, should choose in turn to divorce queer mortality from AIDS per se, yet reinvest his film with the pathos, the pitié and tendresse, largely missing in Ducastel and Martineau’s more buoyant work. The scene between Félix and Mathilde is certainly affecting, yet it is played with fleeting humor and has an improvised mood. The characters’ relations to one another are altogether more aleatory. Ducastel and Martineau play with the queer, unexpected proximity between the elderly woman and the young beur she draws into her home. In the series of loose chapters that make up the diary format of the film, the encounter with Mathilde may be titled “Ma Grand-mère,” but this relation carries no ties. Ozon, reprising the scene, uses it to look more closely at an approach to death, playing out a fuller range of emotions and rendering the affective and erotic link between Laura and Romain the more peculiar. The comparable scenes in Time to Leave and Drôle de Félix draw resonance as well from a broader range of representations that examine interaction between aging women and queer protagonists. One such is Hervé Guibert’s roman-photo, Suzanne et Louise, made up of handwritten text and photographic images of the novelist’s eponymous aunts. Guibert locates the aged aunts, as Ozon locates Laura, in an interior space where images,

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objects, and furniture have remained comfortingly in place over a long span of time. With retrospective knowledge, the project may seem powered by the desire to find proximity and comfort with the moribund. Guibert goes so far as to stage the death of Suzanne, and the laying out of her body. The text reads as a rehearsal of her death, and unconsciously of his. His words flesh out an understanding of the comfort that rehearsal can bring. His desire to anticipate and prepare for death is satisfied by Suzanne’s permission to photograph her after her death and throughout the processes that will lead to her burial. Guibert acknowledges that his simulations of Suzanne’s death, and the series of images they create between them, are a means of delivering himself from anxiety about her departure. The stasis and perpetuity of photography is used to stage scenes that anticipate and manage what is feared in the future. Suzanne is seen to be complicit with Guibert’s use of art to prepare for death. It is a comparable complicity that Laura and Romain foster in Time to Leave and that is manifested most forcefully in the fantasy that they can die and depart together. Suzanne et Louise also provides a point of reference for Time to Leave in its attention to the sensuality of female maturity. Writing about The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda 2000), Mireille Rosello argues that Varda, in her portrait of the artist as an old woman, “questions both the cultural definition of female beauty and the cultural imperative that makes beauty mandatory in our representational universe” (34). She suggests instead that Varda “is much more interested in her search for new visual and narrative grammars of old age” (34). In The Gleaners and I, one part of this new grammar comes in the film’s attention to the filmmaker’s hair “in an extreme close-up, right at the place where the dyed hair is replaced by the grey roots” (34). This strategy is pursued in The Beaches of Agnès (Agnès Varda 2008) where Varda’s hair is seen dyed in such a way as to accentuate the difference between white roots and colored hair. Old age (not beauty) is beautifully flaunted in the film, as seen, too, in images of a naked, aged woman amongst swathes of white feathers and swansdown. Varda, in this latest film, is still inventing new visual grammars. Guibert, before her, makes aging hair the focus of his attention. Looking at his other greataunt, Louise, he offers a series of images where she lets down her tightly plaited long grey hair. The images focus on the un-tressing of the plaits, and the sensual waves that remain in the hair. The hair appears in long strands that catch the light (recalling images of much younger women by Edouard Boubat). Guibert (and Ozon in his filming of Jeanne Moreau) offers a queer attention to aging femininity, which adds a further facet to visual reflections of old age, aligning the pathos of aging sensuality, and its

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lovely incongruity, with other approaches to mortality. While such works may lack the direct rigor of Varda’s work—thus running the risk of fetishizing female beauty—they do cross boundaries between queer and straight, between eroticism and pathos, mortality and creativity. A further point of reference is Josée Dayan’s adaptation of Yann Andréa’s text about Marguerite Duras, Cet Amour-là (2001), which also costars Jeanne Moreau.5 Cet Amour-là designates in its title the love between the queer Andréa and the aging novelist. The film, and Duras’s late texts, cross boundaries between straight and queer, finding choreographed affinities between unbounded female desire and its queer counterparts, and a strange merger of physical care in extremis and erotic passion.6 Ghosting the images of Suzanne and Louise, in Guibert’s volume, is surely Nadar’s image, “The Artist’s Mother (or Wife),” as reproduced by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida (68). There is the same attention to delicate white hair, to the angelic broderie anglaise of a nightgown. The full image, with a handful of flowers clasped to the woman’s lips, is erotic and heavily melancholy, even funereal. That this woman with her wideeyed gaze, swathed in velvet, is designated as the artist’s mother, or his wife, speaks of the strange compression of time in memory and grief.7 This desirability of a woman, and a time out of joint, is what Ozon, too, explores in Time to Leave in his timeless images of Jeanne Moreau. More apt still for Ozon’s narrative than Nadar’s portrait, is Barthes’s accompanying text about the death of his mother and his resurrection of her in memory through examination of her photographs. There is, in Barthes’s text, a quasi-cinematic mise-en-scène of memory through the recognition and mental placing of the objects she used to have around her: In order to “find” my mother, fugitively alas, and without ever being able to hold on to this resurrection for long, I must, much later, discover in several photographs the objects she kept on her dressing table, an ivory powder box (I loved the sound of its lid), a cut-crystal flagon, or else a low chair, which is now near my own bed. (64)

For Barthes, “the life of someone whose existence has somewhat preceded our own encloses in its particularity the very tension of History, its division” (65). Barthes seeks to awaken in himself the sensations that call up his mother’s physical presence, as he writes: “contemplating a photograph in which she is hugging me, a child, against her, I can waken in myself the rumpled softness of her crêpe de Chine and the perfume of her rice powder” (65). The compression of time is refound here in accessing sensation. In

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writing about the death of his mother, Barthes makes reference, both implicit and explicit, to Proust and to the narrator’s intellectual and sensory reckoning with his grandmother’s mortality. Reference to Proust offers an opportunity to draw together some of the threads of these comparisons. Proust’s narrator describes the illness and death of his grandmother in the first chapter of the second volume of Le Côté de Guermantes. The opening of the section focuses on the extraordinary understanding between grandmother and grandson in a manner that arguably foreshadows Ozon’s film. But the focus of Proust’s text is precisely on the loss of this privileged relation as the grandmother nears death: “She had suddenly restored to my keeping the thoughts, the sorrows, which I had entrusted to her ever since I was a child. She was not yet dead. But I was already alone” (311). The text charts the gradual withdrawal of the grandmother into death and abandonment of her grandson. With a proto-cinematic attention to texture, matter, animation, and illusion, the novel illuminates her changes of bodily state. She seems petrified in her dying hours, her sculpted form looking back to an era prior even to the polish of Michelangelo’s marble: Her features, as in a modelling session, seemed to be straining, in one undivided effort of concentration, to conform to a particular pattern which bore no resemblance to anything we recognised. The sculptor’s work was nearing its end, and if my grandmother’s face had grown smaller, it had also hardened. The veins that crossed it were not like veins of marble, but of some rougher stone. (322)

Her age and rigidity are brushed away in death, however, where a sculpted radiance is found. The last paragraph of the scene plays with the signifiers of age and ageless sensuality I have found pursued in the filmic and photographic illustrations chosen here: A few hours later, Françoise was able for the last time, and without causing pain, to comb the beautiful hair which was only slightly greying and had thus far seemed much younger than my grandmother herself. But this was now reversed: the hair was the only feature to set the crown of age on a face grown young again, free of the wrinkles, the shrinkage, the puffiness, the tensions, the sagging flesh which pain had brought to it for so long. As in the distant days when her parents had chosen a husband for her, her features were delicately traced by purity and submission, her cheeks glowed with a chaste expectation, a dream of happiness, an innocent gaiety even, which the years had gradually destroyed. As it ebbed from her, life had borne away its disillusions.

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A smile seemed to hover on my grandmother’s lips. On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her to rest with the face of a young girl. (343)

Proust’s text recalls the tresses of the Nadar photograph and looks forward to their reappearance in Barthes and Guibert. Sensuality and death are strangely embraced in this image of the grandmother on her deathbed. Ozon’s Laura may yet be living, as is his Romain, yet nearing death the two filmic characters acquire the unearthly, death-defying youth Proust’s narrator evokes here. Behind the scene between Romain and Laura, I find a series of European high cultural intertexts, Michelangelo, Guibert, Barthes, Proust, staging the apprehension of mortality, and a place in history, through intergenerational relation and through the soft, evanescent sensuality of the already (or almost) lost female other. In his challenge to the heteronormative, to binary gender and sexuality, Ozon has appropriated pathos as one means of queer contestation. In his appeal to the emotions, memory, materiality, and the senses, he continues a certain line of European high art inquiry, following the approaches to mortality found in European forbearers (in the same way that directors such as Vincent Dieutre, or Derek Jarman, turn to Caravaggio and the Italian Baroque). Through tarrying with grief, and reimagining its relation to Eros, in narrative cinema, Ozon opens up questions about the uses, as well as aesthetics and sensations, of mourning. Butler’s passionate acclamation of injurability as reminder of the ties that bind or bond us one to another, and of the possible purpose of grief, allows us to recognize anew the seemingly timeless resources of pathos in European visual and literary culture, their claims for attention, and their sensory grip.

Queer/Euro Visions Carl F. Stychin

In this essay, I use the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) as a site for illuminating how “Europe” and “queer” inform each other in a range of different ways. My central interest is in how both underscore a tension between the assertion and deconstruction of identity. Furthermore, I explore how the intersection of Europe and queer illustrates the relationship between universality and difference, and highlights how Eurovision is a space that can be politicized. More generally, I aim to demonstrate how Eurovision raises issues at the heart of European integration today. Why do I focus on Eurovision? It has long been argued that queers within and beyond Europe have engaged in the cultural appropriation of the ESC as a tool for the affirmation of identity. Ivan Raykoff understands this through the use of camp,1 Paul Allatson argues that the ESC deploys kitsch,2 and Robert Deam Tobin writes of a queer aesthetic in the ESC. Eurovision has also been explained by Dafna Lemish as a site for transnational queer community formation and democratic participation. Indeed, one might focus upon Eurovision as an arena of citizenship, providing a microcosm and metaphor for a wider progressive sexual politics

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in the European Union today.3 That is, in the EU, human rights standards have led to law reform, and Eurovision, by analogy, might be read as the popular cultural vehicle for enabling equal access to the public sphere. In the overtly political domain, for example, EU anti-discrimination law on the basis of “sexual orientation” is frequently hailed as a great political achievement, as a range of “European institutions have helped to define the rights of LGBT people as human rights” (Kollman 38; see also Binnie 65). Same-sex sexuality, over the last few years, has moved from being seen as a matter for national determination based on cultural particularity, toward a benchmark of respect for universal equality norms that provide a litmus test of European civilization (Stychin, “Same-Sex”).4 However, I argue in this essay that such a straightforward, linear, emancipatory tale of legal and social progress should be eschewed—both with respect to law and Eurovision—in favor of more complex and contradictory readings. Let me begin with a recent example. A lesbian and gay rights march timed to coincide with the ESC in Moscow during 2009 was broken up by police after facing a counter-demonstration by nationalist and religious groups. The protest of around thirty campaigners called for equal rights and condemned the treatment of lesbians and gay men in Russia. At least twenty were arrested by police. The mayor of Moscow had previously described gay pride marches as “satanic” and anti-gay groups had threatened violence against the protesters if the police did not intervene (BBC). These events provide a sobering reminder of the gulf between the liberal rights rhetoric of international and European human rights law—in which “ ‘LGBT human rights’ has become an easy catchword at the EU” (Swiebel 20)—and the reality on the ground in many parts of Europe (both within and beyond the EU) today. Although the desire for EU membership has forced some states to reform anti-gay laws in order to meet accession criteria, progress has been mixed, and the gulf between legislation and daily life across Europe is frequently vast (Stychin, Governing Sexuality 115–38). In Moscow, despite the way in which hosting the ESC was explicitly deployed so as to prove that “the nation has the capability to join in the symbolic commodity production of late, post-industrial modernity” (Bolin 203), the glare of publicity did not inhibit the state from deploying brute repression. While the Moscow protest demonstrates the ongoing close connections between queer sexualities and the ESC, it also simultaneously illuminates the tensions around the universalizing claims of queer rights, the globalization of human rights, and the prevalence of a discourse of European “civilization” on the one hand, and the continuing importance of national-

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ism, cultural particularity, and the role of the authoritarian state on the other. During the protest, a “western” identity category is both embraced in the desire for social progress, and also policed in the name of the nation state. Rather than eschewing identity as queers in the west sometimes advocate, in Russia, identity comes to be deployed, whether strategically or otherwise. Finally, of most immediate relevance for my purposes, Eurovision provides the backdrop against which this identity is articulated and regulated.

Queers and Nations Eurovision . . . offers a model of European citizenship that is particularly amenable to needs that are present in queer populations and communities. robert deam tobin, A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics at the Eurovision Song Contest

What caused the love affair between queers and Eurovision? The answer must be found somewhere in the long and spectacular history of the contest. The ESC began in 1956 as a project of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) (an association of public broadcasters) and participation has always been open to any member country of the EBU. The composition of the EBU is broad. It is not an EU agency; rather, founded in 1950, it is “the world’s largest professional association of national public-service broadcasters” (Raykoff 2). Membership includes, for example, a number of North African and Middle Eastern countries. Thus, the borders of the competition have always been far broader than those of the European Union or its predecessors, the EEC and EC, whose political and cultural borders have themselves been subject to widening throughout history. Based loosely on the San Remo Song Festival, the ESC was explicitly designed as a means of fostering European culture through the increasingly important medium of television, and it has been described as “perhaps the largest and best-organized institution promoting a cultural kind of panEuropean identity” (Tobin 28). Although always intended as a “popular” spectacle, early contests today seem strangely removed from contemporaneous cultural developments and oddly frozen in time. Color television, however, added vibrancy and “over-the-top” appeal, underscoring the importance of costume, sets, and spectacle, which has proven so enticing for a mass audience of queers. If measured solely in terms of audience numbers and engagement of the viewing public, the ESC has proven to be a great

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success, providing one Saturday evening every year shared across national borders within and well beyond the European Union.5 The fact that participation in the ESC has extended so widely—today encompassing Israel, Turkey, and Russia—reinforces the idea that European boundaries are far from fixed or “natural,” possessing instead an indeterminate and fluctuating borderland. Additionally, the ESC has often foreshadowed developments in political union: “Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, and Lithuania joined the ESC a decade before they were allowed to join the EU, predicting Europe’s gradual expansion towards the East” (Raykoff 7). The same, of course, could be said for the United Kingdom, which was one of the original participants of the ESC, long before it achieved membership in the EEC. At the same time, for some viewers, this anti-essential approach to European membership is controversial; “troubling” the certainties of a European order, as the margins freely mix with—and often triumph over—the center (Björnberg 17). Eurovision thus provides a graphic example of how “concepts such as ‘Europe’ and ‘culture’ are . . . discursively shaped categories in a permanent flux where boundaries are constantly contested and negotiated” (af Malmborg and Stra˚th 5). The explanations for the queer cultural appropriation of the ESC are valuable, and no doubt they all provide partial answers. But the relationship between sexuality and nationhood, as it is presented through the ESC, undoubtedly is a complex tale, and “hostility within Europe to the idea of a unified Europe often surfaces in homophobic ways” (Tobin 33). In 2002, for example, the Slovenian entry (thanks to expert jury voting) was a drag act portraying airline flight attendants.6 While a queer reading of this performance might focus on the postmodern play of the signifiers of sexuality, nationhood and globalization, the reaction in Slovenia was far less amused, triggering widespread protests. Moreover, those protests were themselves “cited as evidence that Slovenia was not a suitable candidate for entry into the EU, which it hoped to join in 2004” (O’Connor 170). The reaction underscores how the EU’s ideological underpinnings remain closely tied to a civilizing discourse, which has been most apparent in the context of accession states and the demands of EU institutions for national legal recognition of lesbian and gay rights (Stychin, Governing Sexuality 127–37). As Jan Zielonka observes, “[F]or many of the current member states . . . enlargement looked more like a missionary crusade, in which applicant countries were sometimes treated as an equivalent of medieval barbarians that needed to be taught the superior Western ways.”7 By contrast, the famous victory of Israeli transsexual Dana International in the 1998 ESC was widely (but certainly not universally) interpreted in

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Israel in positive terms as a triumph of liberalism. Raykoff argues that “Dana International’s victory represented geographically peripheral Israel as ‘international’ too, and served to rally liberal West European values towards the image of a secular and progressive nation” (11). It also served as an important tool for community formation by gay men in Israel who, it has been argued, felt part of a wider transnational queer community as a result (Lemish). At the time, the performance was described as blending “popular, representative Israeli music with resistance to ordinary nationalist representation” (Ben-Zvi 28). Tragically, ten years later, the discourse of civilization would be frequently marshaled by Europeans against Israel, in response to its government’s masculinist, military incursions into occupied Palestinian lands. At this moment, Israel becomes constructed (rightly or wrongly) neither as European (thereby erasing Europe’s own history as a group of imperial, invading powers) nor as civilized. Thus, my argument foregrounds a contested and ambiguous relationship between the ESC and queer culture. My view is that it is unwise to adopt a single model of sexuality and identity in an analysis of the ESC, particularly given the likelihood that such a frame will reflect a highly culturally specific construction of sexual identity. As many have argued, the signifiers of the ESC are “highly unstable and not very well culturally anchored” (Björnberg 15), giving rise to a range of readings and interpretations. For example, camp today may be as closely aligned to “folk epistemologies” as it is to queer culture (Hoad 58), giving rise to its appropriation by an imagined and invented “traditional” heterosexual village life of some indeterminate past, as well as by queer transnationals simultaneously. This undoubtedly opens creative space for the viewing public. It also underscores that there are innumerable ways in which the publics may read Eurovision, depending not only upon sexuality, but also gender, nationality, and taste. Furthermore, the relationship of queer sexualities to the nation state is historically complex and contested. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the ESC, which is dependent upon the presentation of the nation state, should bring this relationship into such sharp relief. Nationalism has frequently deployed the hetero/homo binary, as well as constructions of gender and race, in its service. As I have argued in earlier work, homosexuality has often been used as the nation’s other—an alien within—providing a ready means to shore up its self-constitution (Stychin, A Nation by Rights). We can understand the reaction in some quarters of Slovenia (and there are numerous other examples upon which I could draw) as archetypical of a traditional (but ongoing) relationship between sexuality and nationalism

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in which queer sexuality is constructed as outside the bounds of nationhood and appropriate citizenship. By contrast, the acceptance of queer sexualities in some national cultures today can itself be a sign of national identity in which liberal, Western values become constitutive of how a “people” imagines itself. For example, Shauna Wilton has interrogated the way in which gender and sexuality in the Netherlands function “progressively,” albeit often problematically, in the service of the liberal nation state through the production of state materials to teach new immigrants “Dutch values” (451). Finally, music has a historical and ongoing relationship to the construction of national identities, as well as to queer sexualities. The nation state has long been articulated through music, as it “reinforces . . . imaginary cultural boundaries” (Saada-Ophir 208). The ESC is a continuation of that tradition, giving rise to frequent national debates about the “appropriateness” of songs and performers as representative of the national character and identity. It provides a graphic example of the use of music in the service of nationalism as well as transnationalism, in which European countries debate the merits of songs in terms of the degree to which they provide “authentic” representations of national cultures. In the process, nation states implicitly recognize that “the attainment of a sense of historical cultural roots is sought by means of an active construction of the past” (Björnberg 23).

The Queer Politics of Eurovision To move beyond considerations of music as art and foreground its political uses is to admit another level of experience—a sphere where musical texts are as malleable as society itself. caryl clark, “Beethoven’s ‘Ode’ as European Anthem”

My argument in this essay is that a focus on popular culture, in the form of Eurovision, can provide a means, not only of observing the interest of queers in the contest, but more fundamentally, to underscore how the ESC functions as a site of the political. Here I follow Jodi Dean’s contention that we should understand the political in terms of its pluralization, searching out fields of popular culture that come to be articulated in such a way as to constitute a political realm. This is an approach that does not eschew the importance of the state, but it also recognizes a plurality of connecting sites of politics that “become linked together into a particular power formation” (763). I argue that Eurovision provides one such critical site of

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politics, demonstrating how “modern democracies are very much shaped by forces . . . that manifest themselves in a plurality of political and discursive spheres” (Kaplan 71). Of course, this recognition of the political importance of the cultural will come as no surprise to students of the European Union. Officials of the EU increasingly emphasize, largely through “top down” mechanisms, the role of culture in the political construction of a European identity, which is now explicitly tied to the promotion of Union citizenship (Crauford Smith; Barber 255–56). There are multiple ways in which the ESC is a site of the political (many of which are frequently discussed with derision by commentators and fans).8 Throughout its history, the contest has given rise to claims that Eurovision is thoroughly politicized (Raykoff 3). Indeed, the impetus for its creation was political in that it was an attempt to inculcate feelings of “Europeanness” (Tobin 27). Furthermore, the ESC has always led to questionable artistic judgments allegedly based on national and regional allegiances and diasporic identities, and sometimes allegations of overtly political misuses of voting have been made. Perhaps the most blatant example was the 1968 ESC, in which it has been alleged recently that General Franco sought to influence neighboring countries to vote for Spain (Wigg). Overtly political lyrics have sometimes featured in the contest, and ESC officials (and national governments) have selectively censored them for being too political (and therefore not suitable as entertainment) (Raykoff 5). However, my interest in this essay is a more specific theoretical connection of the political and the cultural, and that is through the signifiers “Europe” and “queer.” In fact, I want to promulgate that through the ESC, we can illuminate the complexities of a European identity to the extent that it actually exists, and that this identity can be informed by the insights of queer theory. The idea of a European transnational identity has been widely explored. Some argue that a strong version of European identity is essential for the future of the Union (von Bogdandy 295). Others claim that the very idea of identity— especially to the extent that it replicates the undesirable features of national identity—should be rejected in favor of alternative imaginings that are not dependent upon unity, fixity, the centrality of the inside-out binary, the exclusion of the other, or the imagining of a shared history and essence (Lister and Pia). As an empirical observation, it has been noted that “the enlarged EU is likely to have soft borders in flux rather than hard and fixed external borders. . . . Pan-European identity will be blurred and fragile” (Zielonka 1). Queer theorists, of course, are all too familiar with the politics of identity, and the rejection of the stability, constraints, and nor-

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malizing force of identity politics (Halperin; Warner). At the same time, many would argue that queer itself has become a marker of “a commodityidentity,” with its own forms of inclusion, exclusion, and normalization (Pratt 188). Nevertheless, I believe that queer can illuminate some of the possibilities of Europe to the extent that Europe may itself potentially be a very queer phenomenon. By this claim, I mean to suggest that Europe has a complex relationship to identity, proving to be both, in some moments, stable and bounded, and in others, a shape shifting, indeterminate, ill-defined project. Europe, like queer, may be “a site for the continuing construction and renewal of continually changing identities” (Halperin 122). For example, Europe has its own bank notes, but they contain indeterminate pictorial representations that appear to signify nothing: “There is nothing but emptiness: bridges with empty arches, empty doorways, and empty windows” (Tode 307). The motto of the European Union, “unity in diversity,” underscores the idea of multiplicity, shifting borders, both openness and closure, both the local and the global and, most optimistically, “an escape from the dilemma of universalism and particularism” (Delanty and Rumford 63). More harshly, it has been described as “a saccharin concept” (Borneman and Fowler 495) and, of particular relevance to Eurovision, as representing “an uninterested acceptance of oddities in others that has a patronizing and discriminatory tone to it” (Taras 75). In fact, the relationship of the European Union to “Europe” is itself highly indeterminate. Where are the borders of Europe? Is this identity ever finally fixed? And, if so, on what basis? While the European Union has long been capable of fixing its others—the phrase “Fortress Europe” is certainly one filled with material meaning for many— this is a fortress capable of continually changing its contours through EU expansion. Moreover, processes of Europeanization increasingly focus on convergence and discipline beyond EU borders, underscoring, in a parallel move to queer politics, that “the relation between inside/outside is therefore changing rapidly.”9 My contention is that Eurovision exemplifies this indeterminacy, complexity, and fluidity. The fact that participation in the ESC has extended so widely reinforces the idea that a European song contest need not be coterminous with any particular historically imagined construction of Europe. Singers need not be citizens or residents of the countries they represent. This sometimes means that non-Europeans participate (most famously seen in the victory of Canadian Céline Dion for Switzerland in ESC 1988). It can also underscore the complexities of national identification, as we find performers who are members of minority communities in the north sing-

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ing for their “homelands” in the south. Voters need not be citizens of the countries from which they telephone in their votes. “Ethnic” music, while it features prominently, is mixed freely with global influences “combining musical expressions of ‘rootless’ modernity with a revised conception of ‘roots music’ ” (Björnberg 23), which may be sung in an array of languages (including those invented for the occasion). The viewers’ identification with this array of free-floating signifiers would seem emblematic of a conception of belonging that is best characterized by complexity and pluralism. In this respect, it is a very queer vision of Europe, in which “hybridity is celebrated and aestheticized rather than viewed as the enemy of a pure, essential identity” (Solomon 145). But such claims of Euro-queerness, while intuitively appealing, can also overstate (and romanticize) the queer potential of Eurovision. The forces of nationalism retain a good deal of discursive and material power in twenty-first-century Europe, and this is also apparent in the ESC. For example, prior to the 2007 ESC, the lead singer of the winning Serbian entry, Marija Serifovic, was subject to virulent attack in the Serbian press, which claimed that she was an inappropriate representative of the Serbian nation, due to her Roma ethnicity, her alleged lesbianism, and her claimed “ugliness.” In fact, her candidacy was linked to conspiracy theories involving the west and Kosovo, which fed on xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-Roma sentiment (Anastasijevic). In these moments, the nation asserts itself, and does so in heterosexist, racist, and gendered terms. But Eurovision also highlights a particular paradox of queer theory and politics. While queer may challenge the logic of identity by destabilizing the coherence of a minority group position, the focus on the transgression of normalcy through performance can undermine the political and strategic significance of identity. That is, if queer can be appropriated simply through an act, rather than through the articulation of a coherent group identity, to what extent are we at risk of the depoliticization of sexuality in the process of “queering”? What are the political implications and costs of such a move? Does queer become “a highly universalizing concept” in which “implicitly everyone is actually or potentially queer” (Marshall 91)? In which case, has it been evacuated of all political significance? What is lost if anti-normalization moves are separated from lesbian and gay identity politics?10 Once again, the ESC—like queer—straddles a boundary, this time between the universal and the particular. With respect to sexuality, the tension between the logic of minority group status and the universality of sexual dissidence is clear. On the one hand, the ESC has long had a fol-

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lowing amongst a lesbian and gay viewing public, and Dafna Lemish has pointed to how the ESC has been an important tool for mobilization, identity formation, and even activism through televoting. Indeed, the Moscow demonstration provides a graphic example both of the use of Eurovision as a vehicle for collective protest, as well as its resistance through the power of the state. In this moment, Eurovision becomes “a broader kind of citizenship,” which is open to sexual minorities, providing opportunities for community formation (locally, nationally, and transnationally) and democratic participation by the sexually disenfranchised.11 While I recognize the intuitive appeal of this minoritizing logic, it simultaneously runs into the danger of over-reliance upon a culturally specific experience of sexual identity. The emphasis on camp, for example, may mask the extent to which this analytical tool reflects a culturally narrow understanding of the relationship of sexuality and identity, which is far from universal. It can also overstate and exaggerate the role and importance of popular culture in political struggle (Robson and Kessler). On the other hand, there is a strongly universalizing current that runs through the ESC in which the transgression of sexual normalcy and the subversion of the categories of identity are also apparent. At this moment, the contest has a strong queer inflection, but like the anti-identity logic of queer politics and theory, it is also a potentially universalizing force in that everyone can be queer for an evening. Numerous examples could be cited to demonstrate this point. To take but one, the 2007 ESC runner-up was Ukrainian cross-dressing star Verka Serduchka, “a flamboyant, if grotesque, caricature of Ukrainian village folk” (Savage). The success of Serduchka could be read as a victory for a gay/queer sexual identity, from a national context that is emerging as more pluralistic and open to “transnational values” and “Europeanness” than some more ethnically nationalist parts of the region (Taras 112). However, this interpretation of the politics of the performance would be problematic. The character of Verka Serduchka was invented by a popular mainstream performer and, while some Ukrainians opposed the Eurovision entry on the basis that it was vulgar, the song “Lasha Tumbai” had a strong universal appeal. Although many of the lyrics (particularly the title) appear to be wholly invented and without meaning in any language (thereby avoiding any cultural particularity), the song also included words from at least five different languages. Its appeal can be read as a combination of the strangely exotic particularity of this highly specific village parody and the universalism of the carnivalesque, in which influences from a range of musical styles are clearly apparent including, for example, Weimar Germany.12 Rather than drawing on a narrow

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base, this performance involved cultural appropriations from a wide range of sources. Moreover, the politics of the performance was facilitated by its aesthetic, in that political messages could be conveyed because of the apparently depoliticized queer style. The superficial meaninglessness of the song’s title may well have concealed (but also revealed) a further concrete meaning, as the song was widely understood as really conveying the message “Russia, Goodbye,” underscoring the contentious regional politics of the period (Ershova). Interestingly, Eurovision officials have often sought to maintain a closed border between politics and culture. Songs have been disqualified on the basis that they were too “political,” including the 2009 Georgian entry whose lyric “We Don’t Wanna Put In,” was interpreted by ESC officials as “We Don’t Wanna Putin,” and rendered ineligible for performance (UNIAN). Thus, I would argue that the queer politics of Verka Serduchka, rather than giving rise to a depoliticization of the space of Eurovision, actually facilitated a covertly political message that could be read by a knowing audience. It facilitated the politicization of a transnational European sphere. Serduchka cleverly moved between parody and commentary on regional politics. But the Ukrainian entry was not unique in this ability to move between the local, the regional, and the global. The history of the ESC is replete with examples of the oscillation between universalizing and particularizing currents, as “specific markers of national style might be woven into a song that is otherwise global” (Bohlman 7). For example, the freedom to sing in any language, as opposed to the requirement of singing in an official language of the entry country, has been altered several times, most recently in 1999, when the restriction was again lifted (O’Connor 157). In practice, the rule now allows countries to choose the universal of the English language, which, many believe, greatly enhances the chances of success (although this also may be altered given the expansion of the ESC, in which that hegemony may be undermined). Through the years, however, participating countries have managed on a number of (sometimes famous) occasions to circumvent the particularizing force of language restrictions in order to appeal to a universal audience, such as through nonsensical, invented languages, or familiar refrains. The now infamous Spanish winning entry of 1968 (La, la, la) is an oft-cited example by which the rule was bypassed through the (constant) repetition of “la” in “the most repetitious song ever heard in the Contest” (O’Connor 34). Simultaneously, however, many successful songs of the ESC have been strongly influenced by the forces of cultural “difference” through the use,

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for example, of “indigenous” or “ethnic” musical styles. Of course, the characterization of music as authentically indigenous is itself a tool of nationalist discourse through “an active construction of the past rather than historical accuracy” (Björnberg 23). Nevertheless, it is a highly successful phenomenon that has become widespread in recent years. More accurately, it can be argued that Eurovision voters have rewarded some songs that combine both particularizing and universalizing currents, blending what a “universal” audience will read as indigenous and authentic with global pop music. Like queer, the ESC plays with both universalizing and particularizing moments, straddling the boundary between identity and difference. I would argue that this mirrors the way in which legal protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation struggles between the forces of universalism (human rights) and (cultural, national) specificity. This phenomenon provides a microcosm of wider developments in Europe today. A widely cited example of the successful mixing of the universal and the particular can be found in Turkey’s winning song, “Everyway that I can,” by Sertab from 2003. So-called “ethnic stylings” are combined with English lyrics and popular music, which, as Thomas Solomon argues, uses “the exotic Turkish elements” such as belly dancing “within an overall hybrid style, and seem to be intended not so much for consumption in Turkey, but for distribution, promotion and consumption outside Turkey” (137). Matthew Gumpert has described this strategy as “Auto-Orientalist” in that ethnicity is made consumable, and cultural difference becomes “just another performance designed for the West” (155). The symbolic significance of Turkey’s victory cannot be underestimated, and it was “widely seen in Turkey as an allegory of its aspirations to join the European Union and its frustratingly slow movement toward that goal” (Solomon 136). As the lyrics urge: Tell me whatcha see in other girls all around Come on closer and tell me whatcha don’t find here Come on now now I wanna give you everything you’ve been missin’ out Just let go and let me love you.

The song may provide a useful lesson for those working toward EU membership in Turkey and elsewhere. “Success” in the political realm may depend upon the domestication of the “exotic,” which becomes assimilable into the dominant so-called “universal” values of the EU. In this way, both Eurovision and the struggle for EU membership become performative forms of identity, in which the other must reiterate that difference and par-

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ticularity, if not transcended, can at least be contained, domesticated, and normalized in such a way that it is non-threatening and non-transgressive. The political challenge of EU expansion is answered by making difference “slightly and safely exotic” for its audience (Gumpert 151). At this moment, the strategy is to normalize the queer, rather than to queer the normal.

Grounding All Flights: The Materiality of the Political Eurovision also highlights a deeper tension within the logic of Europe. Peter Fitzpatrick has persuasively demonstrated that Europe is continually constructed such that it can be made to appear to be the universal against which various others fail to live up to its liberal ideals (125). At the same time, Europe can be a particular, against which others can be excluded as not essentially belonging. The slogan “unity in diversity” perfectly encapsulates this tension, as “the European dimension is conceived of as a mediating instance between the global scale and local allegiances” (Sassatelli 439). But this renders the meaning of “Europe” permanently deferred and yet forever asserted: as an identity and as difference, for “heterogeneity is a conceptual problem for any notion of identity” (Mayer and Palmowski 582). The logic of identity is turned to as a means of articulating unity in an endless search for the discovery of that point of commonality. The quest, however, is forever undone by the logic of difference, of multiplicity, and of the lack of fixity of the frontier. This leads to the celebration of diversity in which Europe can be “attached to everything in need of valorization” (Sassatelli 445). As Eurovision so vividly demonstrates, the assertion of identity can always be undermined, which the ESC manages to do so successfully, I would argue, because of its lack of claim to being either high culture or explicitly political. Like queer, its power lies in its ability to transgress and to trouble, including the boundary between the political and the cultural. But the tension between transgression and assimilation remains central to identity. Queer activists and theorists have long emphasized the transgressive dimension of sexuality, eschewing the rights-based (and, some might argue, assimilationist) strategies of the lesbian and gay movement in favor of a politics of “direct address,” activism, performance, and the subversion of identity (Bower). However, it strikes me that the divisive debates around sexual politics too often miss the important point that the assertion of identity, as well as its transgression, may both be important “moments” in a progressive political strategy focused on greater inclusion, the plu-

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ralization of sexualities, and the destabilization of the heterosexual norm (Stychin, “Being Gay”). We can see that tension all too clearly in sexual politics in Europe today. Rights discourse has proven increasingly powerful within the EU and beyond, including as a condition of membership for accession countries. In this moment, the assertion and recognition of a coherent sexual identity has been important for the advancement of progressive sexuality politics. The Moscow demonstration highlights the power of identity as a fulcrum around which to mobilize and resist the repressive nationalist state. Yet, while identity may provide an important basis for resisting violence, we also need to recognize the violence of identity’s assertion, which necessarily erects borders, erases difference, and too often normalizes and disciplines us into citizenship. The focus on the recognition of same-sex relationships—an increasingly important development within the EU— provides an example of this phenomenon, in which the model of the caregiving monogamous couple may come to dominate sexuality politics. At the same time, diversity and difference across time and place can come to be erased through the universalizing power of human rights discourse, too often reinforcing the hegemony of a culturally specific identity position. Queering those newly emerging boundaries of normalcy becomes an important corrective to the discipline of rights politics. Similarly, Eurovision is caught in this conundrum of transgression and normalization. While its history may be replete with examples of the transgression of the “norms” of what officials may consider to be appropriate European entertainment (some of which has proven appealing to the voting general public), there are also strong normalizing currents by which the ESC may be becoming more professionalized, appropriate, wholesome, dignified, slick and, as a consequence, increasingly un-queer. In sum, my argument is that the ESC replicates queer in the way in which it oscillates between a stable, collective sexual identity and a site for the transgression and destabilization of identity. But I also claim that Europe is a space in which we find this same tension. At times, Europe can queer the nation state, while at others, Europe replicates the nation state by reproducing its stable borders and the inside/out dichotomy. Similarly, the language of human rights tends to normalize sexual and other identities within Europe, as rights discourse becomes increasingly entrenched and a sign of European civilization. Eurovision thus provides a laboratory in which we can observe the extent to which a coherent European identity may be emerging and how it can be queered. The ESC challenges the idea of an essential Europe

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in terms of nations and peoples, and it underscores the extent to which identity is a social construction always open to reimagining. The borders of the ESC demonstrate the fuzziness of the frontier, in which belonging is open ended and negotiable. Yet I urge caution in adopting a position of unqualified celebration of the transgressive and transformative potential of Eurovision. It is all too easy to view the contest as promoting a formal equality between peoples in which membership is open to all and the inside/out binary is permanently troubled. Like queer politics, such a position, with its focus on culture and performance, can obscure real imbalances of power, inequalities, and exclusions that remain at the heart of Europe today. As Neville Hoad has suggested in the context of the Miss World Pageant, through these television events “the claim of equality of opportunity and meritocracy is displaced from the economic arena and instead insisted upon culturally” (64). An emphasis on popular culture can obscure issues of race, religion, ethnicity, national belonging, and economic distribution, which must remain central to a progressive European project.13 There is, thus, a fundamental tension—which is produced as much by queer as it is by Europe—between the depoliticization of identity and the foregrounding of a politics of representation and redistribution in addition to recognition (Fraser 17–18). This point can be demonstrated using the example of the United Kingdom’s entry in the 2007 ESC, “Flying the Flag (For You),” performed by re-formed pop group Scooch. This self-consciously camp music tune was accompanied by a vivid performance by the group, dressed as an airline crew in flight (which draws upon the transnational dimension of European citizenship mobility). The song and its performance could be read as providing a self-conscious and self-aware portrayal of European citizenship, which was even accompanied by flags of European nation states and the European Union, reproduced on the drinks trolleys as props. The performance had an overwhelmingly tongue-in-cheek quality, replete with queer sexual innuendo. From the perspective of camp, “Flying the Flag” seems the ideal vehicle, which, one might have thought, would have tapped into a transnational queer affinity. However, the U.K. entry had a dismal showing on the night, as audiences seemed not to get the joke; or alternatively, they got the joke but did not find it amusing. I would suggest that the song’s message conveys quite an ambivalent politics. For those who do not yet possess transnational citizenship status, mobility rights are no laughing matter. The ESC, by contrast, provides a public space in which to sing in support of genuinely held (and certainly not ironic) aspirations to European citizenship (Bolin). It is significant that

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the lyrics of the entry uniformly describe the European travel experience in one direction only. The message of “Flying the Flag” appears to be that “we” in the west can sample the exotic other on cheap flights, safe in the knowledge that we can return to our “normal” selves unscathed and unmarked: London to Berlin All the way from Paris to Tallinn Helsinki on to Prague . . . We’re flying the flag all over the world— Yes we’re flying—take you all around the world. Flying the flag for you.

There is certainly no reference made to economic migration, nor to inequalities between regions. Rather, the lyrics perhaps unintentionally reveal—to paraphrase Raykoff—who gets to go “camping” it up in this new Europe. This exemplifies the depoliticization of a queer consumerbased citizenship, in which gross material inequalities are erased. It mirrors an oft-repeated criticism of queer culture that, in its focus on playful performativity, it can lose sight of real inequalities of distribution, and “can be read as denying the experiences and problems of those for whom sexual identity is central to their lives” (Rahman 117). We should also not obscure the cultural specificity of a queer aesthetic, which too often masquerades as a universal currency. To return to the 2007 winning ESC entry performed by Serbian singer Marija Serifovic, I would tentatively hypothesize that, for the Western queer subject, this performance may have been read (by some at least) as a butch with her group of femme back-up singers. A romantic ballad is sung in a language that seems very obscure, but what may be familiar is the apparent gender transgression of Serifovic, who sings to her group of adoring, femmestyled singers. With this reading, her victory could be understood as the triumph of a playful lesbian camp, in which heterosexual discourses of romantic love are parodied, in a performance resembling both “liturgical dancing” and “a slow-motion lesbian porn film” (Savage). By contrast, feminist cultural commentator Germaine Greer described the victory in more earnest (and romanticized)—yet nevertheless sexually and ethnically transgressive—terms: Serifovic’s big, supple voice, apparently effortlessly produced from her deep chest, is imbued with a special kind of feeling which comes from one of the wellsprings of the European song tradition. Marija Serifovic

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is not just an out lesbian, she is Romany. If ever a voice deserved to reign over Eurovision it is the voice of the Gypsy, who is made to live everywhere in Europe as if it was nowhere. (Greer)

Greer highlights the complexities of national identity, for Serifovic is both representative of a nation state, yet is ethnically constructed as stateless. She both draws on tradition, but (according to Greer) queers the nation simultaneously. However, as became clear upon her victory, Marija saw her performance very differently, pointedly remarking that “I like to hear the music not watch it” and “I hope that next year in Belgrade it will be a music contest again” (Savage). She approached the contest in great seriousness, emphasizing that this was a victory for artistic merit over spectacle. Rather than providing a queer challenge to the masculinist boundaries of nationhood, I would speculate that Serifovic’s performance was read very “un-queerly” by some within Serbia, where this may have been interpreted as a victory primarily for the nation, and a marker of Serbia’s international rejuvenation, rather than a sign of sexual liberalism, pluralism, or irony.14 Rather, the irony perhaps is to be found in the fact that Serifovic was appointed by the EU as an intercultural ambassador for the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue (European Commission) while, at the same time, singing at an election rally of the Serbian Radical Party (the platform of which is based on the Greater Serbia ideal) (Reuters). Yet, at the same time, Serifovic’s victory was also claimed by the beleaguered lesbian and gay community in Serbia “who celebrated the lesbian chic-tinged performance as a rare sight in the conservative Christian Orthodox country,” in which the universalism of the protection of human rights may be a distant dream.15

Concluding Thoughts I have argued in this essay that the ESC provides a unique opportunity for grappling with the complexities of both “Europe” and “queer.” In Eurovision, we find a continuing movement between the assertion of stable collective identities and their refusal. We see currents of normalization as well as transgression. But we also observe a tension between the assertion and performance of a stable, knowable European identity, and the troubling of national and transnational identities, and the inclusions and exclusions wrought in their name. We experience moments when identity is clearly being (re)imagined through the desire for inclusion. But we also find occasions when the boundary of what constitutes “European” is firmly closed

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and policed along sexual, racial, ethnic, and other vectors. Like queer, the ESC sometimes demonstrates that the performative is clearly political, but it also highlights the dangers of depoliticization, in which queer (like Europe) can become a universal divorced from political specificity. Finally, Eurovision underscores an ongoing tension at the heart of both queer and Europe today—the struggle over the meaning of community and identity. In this regard, I would argue that it is appropriate (but not for the reasons given by EU officials) that the motto of the European Union is “unity in diversity.” The format of the ESC is framed around the same idea—that identity can be constructed through the diversity of its members, who together constitute more than the sum of their parts. At its highest, Eurovision “plays an important role in bringing people together to debate and act together and forge a common reality that is secured by our equality of difference” (Lister and Pia 66). But what queer, like Europe, equally illustrates is what Nikki Sullivan has described as a “fracturing process,” in which the idea(l) of community and identity is revealed to be impossible (148). The ESC, in my view, in its endless attempt to construct a unity out of diversity, destabilizes the logic of community through the display of “multiplicity, heterogeneity, or difference” and “through the transgression of boundaries, identities, sociality” (148). Thus, as queer has highlighted, and Europe has demonstrated so thoroughly, the search for a unitary identity is ultimately futile, and should be eschewed in favor of more contingent notions of belonging, membership, and affiliation, in which the inside/out boundary is replaced by more fluid and provisional ideas of membership which may be contingent on particular political goals and projects. Although for queers in Europe—such as those in Moscow today—stable notions of identity may have a strategic political usefulness, I would argue that, in the long run, the violence of identity demands more open textured and nuanced readings of who “we” are.

notes

introduction. queer and europe: an encounter Sudeep Dasgupta and Mireille Rosello 1. In 1989, three Martinican essayists started their manifesto in praise of Creole culture with a statement: “Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles” (Bernabé et al 1993, 75). Refusing the false dichotomies of either Europe or Africa, West or East, they inaugurated creoleness as the acceptance of what may seem as “abnormal,” or “a defect,” and which, instead, “may turn out to be the indeterminacy of the new, the richness of the unknown” (90). 2. Their exacerbated nationalism is what the founding fathers of Europe thought a free and unified Europe would be able to oppose. See, for example, Rossi’s and Spinelli’s Ventotene Manifesto, which was adopted as the program of the Movimento Federalista Europeo after circulating among the members of the Italian Resistance. 3. “L’Europe, qui était naguère un défi ou une espérance est désormais une évidence. Elle s’est banalisée. Pour les nouvelles générations, qui n’ont pas été associés aux controverses de l’après guerre, elle fait partie du paysage. L’idéal est devenu réalité. Du même coup, si rares sont ceux qui rejettent le projet européen, l’enthousiasme n’est plus vraiment au rendez-vous. L’aventure a laissé la place à la routine” (Ferenczi 10). 4. See the beginning of David Ruffolo’s Post-Queer Politics and the introduction to the special issue of Social Text coordinated by David Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz. 5. See “Black Orpheus,” Sartre’s preface to Leopold Senghor’s 1948 Anthology of African and Malagasy Poetry. 6. The First International Sexual Nationalisms conference held at the University of Amsterdam in 2011 took this recent development of homonationalism as its central problematic. See also the special issue of Public Culture edited by Eric Fassin (2010) and especially “National Identities and Transnational Intimacies: Sexual Democracy and the Politics of Immigration in Europe” (Fassin 2010).

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Notes to pages 13–28

7. As Sedgwick puts it in Tendencies, “In the short-shelf-life American market of images, maybe the queer moment, if it’s here today, will for that very reason, be gone tomorrow” (Sedgwick 1994, xii). 8. Although “space” here is more a mental and intellectual configuration than a geographical territory. 9. Or rather, the fact that the so-called “New World” keeps forgetting (i.e. narrativizing as its own) its pre-Columbian past. While the myth of the “discovery” of the Americas has more or less lost currency, its consequences (the impression that America does not “have” a history) still sounds like a plausible story. 10. See the time gap between Butler’s publication of Bodies That Matter (1993) and its translation in French by Amsterdam in 2009. Undoing Gender, on the other hand, appears in translation two years after its original release in 2006, which means that for the French public, in this case, the chronology of Butler’s work is reversed. 11. Each disciplinary discourse will draw a different Europe and place different kinds of borders around its object. Geographers, historians, philosophers, politicians, and artists will have their own definition of Europe. Economically, the European Union may be a self-contained territory but Europe is sometimes larger and sometimes smaller than the Union. Most thinkers agree that the borders of Europe are “unresolved” and that it is made up of “uncertain territories” (Boer 2006). (same-sex) marriage and the making of europe: renaissance rome revisited Gary Ferguson 1. Ferguson, Queer: 49–54. On the questions raised by using the terms “sexuality” and “homosexuality” in pre-nineteenth-century contexts, see ibid., esp. 1– 49. Cf. Ferguson, “Pour.” This essay was written as an exploratory study for a book in preparation with the working title “Like Man and Wife”? A (Hi)story of Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome. Early drafts were read by David LaGuardia and Jeremy Foster, as well as by participants in a Gender and Sexuality Works-in-Progress Seminar, hosted by the Women’s Studies Program and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Pennsylvania, especially the respondents Rita Barnard and Melissa Sanchez, and a number of colleagues and friends, including Lisa Jane Graham, Kristen Poole, and Meredith Ray. I am extremely grateful for their generous and valuable comments. 2. Ferguson, Queer, ibid. For a study exploring relationships between the terms of its title, see Freccero.

Notes to pages 28–32

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3. See the classic study of Hay. Among a vast bibliography, cf. Delanty (esp. Chapters 2 and 3), Le Goff, and Cowling. 4. It must be stressed that the emergence of the idea and the political structures of these nations and then states differed considerably from one country to another in numerous and complex ways. If, in France, the process ultimately fed and was fed by that of the pacification of the Wars of Religion, in Spain regional national identities remained strong. Italy offers another very different picture with political power divided and shifting between the papacy and a number of kingdoms, principalities, duchies, republics, and city-states. 5. Hampton, 218–19, quoting, with slight modification, the translation of Frame, 694, my italics; cf. Montaigne, Œuvres, 887–88. Subsequent references to the works of Montaigne will indicate page numbers in the English translation, followed by those in the French edition. 6. For a notable expression of such sentiments, see the French poet Joachim Du Bellay, Les Antiquitez de Rome and Les Regrets. Cf. the seminal study of Greene, 220 – 41. 7. Cf. Ferguson, Queer, 270 –72. 8. The original French text reads as follows: Le 18 [ mars], l’ambassadur de Portugal fit l’obédiance au pape du royaume de Portugal pour le roi Philippes, ce mesme ambassadur qui estoit ici pour le roi trespassé et pour les Etats contrarians au roy Philippes. Je rancontrai au retour de Saint Pierre un home qui m’avisa plesamment de deus choses: que les Portugais foisoint leur obédiance la semmene de la Passion, et puis que ce mesme jour la station estoit à Saint Jean Porta Latina, en laquelle église certains Portugais, quelques années y a, estoint entrés en une étrange confrerie. Ils s’espousoint masle à masle à la messe, avec mesmes serimonies que nous faisons nos mariages; faisant leurs pasques ensamble; lisoint ce mesme évangile des nopces, et puis couchoint et habitoint ensamble. Les esprits romeins disoint que, parce qu’en l’autre conjonction de masle et femelle, cete seule circonstance la rand legitime, que ce soit en mariage, il avoit semblé à ces fines jans que cest’autre action deviendroit pareillemant juste, qui l’auroit autorisée de serimonies et misteres de l’Eglise. Il fut brulé huit ou neuf Portugais de ceste belle secte. Je vis la pompe espagnole. On fit une salve de canons au chasteau St. Ange et au palais et fut l’ambassadur conduit par les trompettes et tambours et archiers du pape. Je n’entrai pas audedans voir la harangue et la serimonie. L’ambassadur du Moscovite, qui estoit à une fenestre parée pour voir ceste pompe, dict qu’il avoit été convié à voir une grande assemblée; mais qu’en sa nation, quand on parle de troupes de chevaus, c’est tousjours vint et cinq ou trante mille; et se moqua de tout cest ap-

192

Notes to pages 32–36 prest, à ce que me dict celui mesmes qui estoit commis à l’antretenir par truchemant. (1227–28)

9. Antonio Tiepolo’s dispatch to the Papal States states: Among some Portuguese and Spanish men, eleven have been captured, who, assembled in a church in the vicinity of Saint John Lateran, carried out certain ceremonies, and with terrible wickedness sullying the holy name of matrimony, married each other, joining together like husband and wife. On the majority of occasions, twenty-seven of them gathered together and more, but this time it was only possible to seize these eleven, who will go to the stake as they deserve. Sono stati presi undeci fra Portughesi et Spagnuoli, i quali adunatissi in una chiesa, ch’è vicina à S. Giovanni Laterano, facevano alcune lor cerimonie, et con horrenda sceleraggine bruttando il sacrosanto nome di matrimonio, si maritavano l’un con l’altro, congiongendosi insieme, come marito con moglie. Vintisette si trovavano, et più, insieme il più delle volte, ma questa volta non ne hanno potuto coglier più che questi undeci, i quali anderanno al fuoco, et come meritano. Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Senato, Dispacci ambasciatori, Roma, filza 13, fols. 120v–121r; reproduced in Mutinelli: I, 121.

10. In yet another ironic turn of fate, Henry had inherited the Portuguese crown unexpectedly when King Sebastian died in an ill-fated campaign against Muslims in Morocco, supported by forces that Pope Gregory had provided for a rebellion from Ireland against the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I of England. 11. See Dandelet. In relation to Philip II and Gregory XIII, however, Pastor emphasizes the differences between the two men’s interests and policies, and, in particular, what he terms the king’s “Caesaro-Papism.” 12. Having pressed his claim by force, Philip was recognized as king of Portugal by the Cortes of Tomar in mid-April 1581, on condition that he respect many of the realm’s traditional privileges and independent legal and administrative structures. 13. Archivio di Stato di Roma, Fondo della Confraternita di S. Giovanni Decollato. For an introduction to the Confraternity and its archive, see Di Sivo. The entries in the Giornale, busta 5, vol. 10, in an untidy hand and subsequently crossed out, could have been taken down hastily as the prisoners were interviewed. A carefully written and more formal text is found in the registers of Testamenti, busta 16, vol. 34 and was published by Orano, 55–61. While the latter redaction is generally easier to read, the scribe made many errors that Orano reproduces, in addition to introducing a number of

Notes to pages 36 –38

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his own. Important information is thus falsified—for example concerning the men’s geographical origins—which can be corrected by referring to the Giornale. I express my warm thanks to Paul Grendler, who drew my attention to the San Giovanni registers, as well as to Tom and Elizabeth Cohen for their advice. Laurie Nussdorfer kindly introduced me to Michele Di Sivo at the State Archives in Rome, whose generous assistance in working with the original documents was particularly valuable. 14. This is the case, for example, with Giordano Bruno; see Orano, 88–89. 15. Dandelet documents how in Rome, especially from the 1580s onward, Iberians from different regions tended to be seen and to see themselves as sharing a common Spanish identity: “Rome provided . . . a context, where the monarchs and their primary subjects generally succeeded in achieving the ‘Union in Name’ that was often so elusive in Iberia itself. In Rome, at least, regional ‘national’ identities, although they did not disappear, took second place to the larger Spanish nation” (119). 16. After extensive alterations in the nineteenth century, this became Nostra Signora del Sacro Cuore on the Piazza Navona. 17. Warner makes this point in order to argue that marriage is not simply a choice among others. By endorsing some kinds of relationship, it necessarily excludes and devalues others, privileging, notably, the couple (Warner 81–147). 18. The following summary can do no more than offer a brief sketch of certain salient features of the relevant history of marriage. For a good introduction to a vast and complex subject and the scholarly literature devoted to it, see Reynolds and Witte and, on Italy, Dean and Lowe. 19. See, by way of example, tales 21 and 40 from Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron. Regional variation was considerable. Religious ceremonies were more common in England and France than in Italy. See the essay by David d’Avray in Dean and Lowe, 107–15. 20. The principal requirements imposed by the 1563 decree “Tametsi” were that banns be published (a requirement affirmed earlier by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215) and that marriages be celebrated in the presence of the parish priest (or his delegate or the ordinary) as well as of two or three witnesses. In many places, secular laws required parental consent for women under a stated age, although their validity was disputed by canon lawyers. On Italy, see the essay by Trevor Dean in Dean and Lowe, 85–106. It must also be noted that the general evolution described in relation to marriage progressed at different rates in different places, both within the Catholic world and in Protestant countries, where Reformed theologians frequently denied its status as a sacrament. Bray suggests that traditional ways of contracting

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Notes to pages 38– 45

marriage survived longer in England, for example, where the Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriages was adopted by Parliament only in 1753 (Friend, 215–17). 21. An affrèrement was also sometimes entered into by a husband and wife in order to modify the financial basis of their marriage (Tulchin 632–33). 22. The desire to solemnize a union of some kind is also evident in a latefifteenth-century case from Florence, described by Rocke, involving two men who swore a vow to each other in church (172). 23. In relation to Florence, see Rocke, 107–9 and 170 –72; on the same phenomenon in Spain, see Berco, 30, 52, and 154 n.32. 24. See Romeo, 107–9, and Scaramella; cf. Marcocci. 25. In the eighteenth century, euphemistic uses of marital terminology are again evident and give rise to sexual play. For Paris, see Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Archives de la Bastille, principally ms. 10566 and the documents concerning Simon Langlois and Emmanuel Bertault. Most of the documents are translated, although not without occasional errors, in Merrick and Ragan, 52–59. Cf. also ms. 10257 (Baron) and ms. 10259 (Harault, Rousseau, and Pinson). On London, where in some instances ceremonies may have been intended to form recognized unions, see Bray, Homosexuality, 81, 86, and 88, and Norton, 55–6, 61–2, 100 –2; cf. 188–89, 204 –5, and 236 – 43. 26. Here the presentations of Romeo and Scaramella seem to me rather different from that of Marcocci. 27. Subject to various constraints, the modern Roman Catholic liturgy allows a choice of Scripture readings. Matthew 19:3–6 remains a possible Gospel passage. 28. In terms of the extremely useful categories defined by Eve Sedgwick, this kind of sexual desire was universalizing as opposed to minoritizing. For a discussion of this and relevant work by historians and queer theorists, see Ferguson, Introduction, Queer. 29. I am extremely grateful to Dr. Marcocci for sending me a copy of his article and subsequently his transcription of the trial fragments. For the purposes of this essay, it has not been possible to exploit this material fully. Because the names of the men involved appear in various Italianized spellings, I adopt principally the standardized modern forms proposed by Marcocci. 30. Robles had also first met Battista in Flanders. This territory, under Spanish control since 1506, had launched a rebellion against Philip II in 1576. 31. Marcocci argues that a number of couples in the group had married. The available evidence, however, does not seem to me to prove this. 32. “lui si faceva bugiarare et serviva per donna” (Marcocci 116). 33. Quoted in Warner, 99. Cox currently teaches at the California Western School of Law. Her piece is entitled “A (Personal) Essay.” Accord-

Notes to pages 45– 49

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ing to the website of Freedom to Marry, of whose Steering Committee Cox is a member, she and “her partner of over twelve years” were married in Canada in July 2003 (http://www.freedomtomarry.org/about_us/steering_ committee/barbara_cox.php, consulted on September 28, 2009). 34. The trial records are fragmentary almost certainly due to an act of deliberate destruction. See Marcocci, 110 –12. 35. Saint John at the Latin Gate stands in one of the remotest and least developed parts of Rome within the Aurelian Walls. Today it is an area of parks and villas; in the sixteenth century, before it was drained, it was an inhospitable marsh, susceptible to infestation by malaria, a frequently neglected and marginal place. The church’s isolation, its peculiar ecclesiastical status as a dependency of the Lateran Canons, and the fact that the Portuguese man arrested, Marcos (or Marco) Pinto, lived there, no doubt explain its attraction for a group not wanting to draw attention. On the history of the church, see Matthiae et al. and Crescimbeni. 36. This page, http://www.sangiovanniaportalatina.com / Wedding _Information_Eng.htm, appeared at the top of a Google search on May 2, 2008. 37. For a moving and compelling memoir describing a personal journey of engagement with such questions in the context of the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, see Hartman. For explorations of queer and the (post-) colonial, see Freccero, 79–104, and Goldberg. 38. The Travel Journal itself was almost lost to history. Not destined for publication, the work was discovered only in the late eighteenth century; having been edited, the manuscript was deposited in the Bibliothèque Royale, from where it once more rapidly disappeared. 39. Or Gaspare di Martino di Vittorio: “non volse lassar memoria alcuna” (16, 34, fol. 54v). 40. As noted, Tiepolo speaks of twenty-seven men, who met on several occasions. Others, doubtless, went unrecorded altogether. a case of mistaken identity: female russian social revolutionaries in early-twentieth-century switzerland Dominique Grisard 1. See Baynac’s historical novel The Story of Tatiana (22). It is the most thoroughly researched account of the case. Local historian Wyss published a booklet on the “terrorist murder in the Grand Hotel Jungfrau.” In more recent years, two historical studies on Russians in Switzerland devote several pages to her case (Collmer; Moser). 2. Between 1902 and 1906 alone, seven men held the position. His six successors were assassinated.

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Notes to pages 51–54

3. See “Zum Attentat” 4; also Moser 278. Le Matin de Paris was also sure that the shooting was a crime of passion. According to its journalist, Madame Stafford was seen in the company of two women—a young, beautiful woman and a woman “old enough to be her mother”—who stayed at another hotel in town (Baynac 17). When they parted ways, they “embraced each other tenderly” (17). 4. See Wyss 19. From 1809 to 1907, Finland was an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian empire. 5. Baynac’s interpretation finds its parallel in dominant understandings of butch-femme relationships where the femme is relegated to the role of the enabler of her masculine partner’s acceptance in society. While the butch’s masculinity is seen as a performance with subversive potential, the femme’s feminine self-presentation is rarely perceived as anything but the uncritical reproduction of patriarchal gender norms (Grisard). 6. “Femmeninity,” they argue, is about performing gender “difference prior to any determination of sexual preference or gender identity” (165). 7. I underscore the femme’s potential to question our investment in visual markers as either an expression or a subversion of “inner truth” that underlies identification and recognition processes (Grisard 136). 8. See Meijer, 1, 25. In fact, one may speak of two waves of Russian students studying at Swiss universities: The first wave started in 1867, and the Tsar put an end to it in 1873. The second wave lasted from 1881 to 1914. Five to six thousand Russian women studied at Swiss universities in those years. They were from elite and middle-class backgrounds, many of them Jewish. Most of them were interested both in personal emancipation and in serving the rural poor (Meijer 13; Neumann 131). 9. See Whittaker, 38. Most Russian women studying medicine at Swiss universities became zemstvo doctors, state-employed medical doctors assigned to poor rural populations (Neumann 187). Women were given the right to serve as zemstvo doctors in 1880, but only in 1897 were they granted equal rights with male zemstvo doctors. Neumann notes that the fact that so many Russian women studied medicine in Europe and elsewhere feminized the medical profession in Russia with the effect that even today the vast majority of doctors are women and the profession holds a lower status than in other countries (131). 10. Switzerland was a popular place to study because of its reputation as a tourist destination, its central location in Europe, large international community, and most important, its relatively liberal stance toward gatherings of political refugees (Neumann 94 –95). 11. See Dürrenmatt, “Russland,” 1. The Berner Volkszeitung was the conservative and Christian voice for the rural small trade in the light of increasing industrialization.

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12. See Moser, 89. At the time, professors were paid according to the number of students attending their lectures. Liberal German refugees comprised about one-third of the faculty of Swiss universities. 13. See Dürrenmatt, “Russland.” Between 15 and 20 percent of female Russian students at Swiss universities were part of the organized, revolutionary movement; most of them joined the Bund, a Jewish social-democratic organization, or the Mensheviks. 14. In 1900, admission to the University of Zurich became more restrictive, at least on paper. Because of its competition with the University of Bern over students, restrictions, however, were never implemented (Gagliardi, “Die Russenfrage,” 782). 15. Russian secondary schools for girls did not offer Latin or Greek. 16. On the concept of “masculinity without men,” see Halberstam, Female. 17. The original German text reads: “Die russische Studentin, welche sich durch eine souveräne Verachtung aller Äusserlichkeiten häufig die Kritik der Westeuropäer zuzieht, zeichnet sich gelegentlich durch ein spontanes Ueberwallen der Empfindung aus, das für dritte nicht immer von angenehmen Folgen begleitet ist . . .” (NZZ 1905, qtd. in Neumann 165–66 [All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.]) 18. A definition of “prosthetic masculinity” can be found in Halberstam, Female, 3– 4. 19. See Whittaker, 36. Even though Russian women possessed more civil rights than most of their European counterparts, they were still legally subordinated to either father or husband (Neumann 66, 75, 204). 20. Brupbacher seems to be critical of free love practices among Russians when he notes that “in times when people don’t feel like they have much to expect from the world, sexuality becomes more central. Before 1905, the entire Russian youth was enthralled by the Revolution. After the Revolution of 1905, when the bourgeois youth—in part because of the defeat of the revolution, in part due to the looming ghost of a dictatorship of the proletariat—felt demoralized and threatened, became melancholic, lost its faith in its purpose of life and gave itself up to . . . the most individualist, shoddiest erotic debauchery” (Brupbacher, Liebe 20). The original German reads: Es ist interessant zu sehen, wie in Zeiten, wo die Menschen von der übrigen Welt nicht viel erwarten, die Geschlechtlichkeit ins Zentrum des Menschen rückt. Vor 1905 schwärmte die ganze russische Jugend für die Revolution. Nach der Niederlage der Revolution von 1905, als die bürgerliche Jugend einerseits infolge der Niederlage der Revolution, andererseits durch das drohende Gespenst der Diktatur des Proletariats

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Notes to pages 57–59 entmutigt und erschreckt wurde, wurde sie melancholisch, verlor den Glauben an ihren bisherigen Lebensinhalt und ergab sich . . . den allerindividualistischsten, ausgesprochen qualitätslosen, nichts als erotischen Schwelgerei.

21. The original German text reads: “Die Russin verlegte sich auf ’s Studieren, und— entledigt der sittlichen Schranken—läuft sie auf der ganzen Welt herum, geschwängert mit Umsturzgedanken.” (Nebelspalter 52.1911, qtd. in Moser 264). 22. The original German text reads: “Neun Zehntel der grünen Bengel aus den Gymnasien und Realschulen, die dem Revolutionsteufel verfallen sind, befinden sich in den Klauen der Studentinnen . . .” (Berner Volkszeitung, Dec. 1906, qtd. in Neumann 165). 23. The original German text reads: “Ehe als unmodern, freie Liebe als besser, die Vielweiberei als Ideal bezeichnet” (Wehntaler 1909, qtd. in Moser 267). 24. The original German text reads: Grenzenlos wie Russlands Flächen sind dort die Seelen. Es gilt, über die innere Dumpfheit hinwegzukommen, für Volk und Zar. Also werden Länder erobert und verloren und immerzu Schlachten geschlagen. Das grösste Weltreich und Raubreich seit Rom entsteht. Und es ist dennoch kein Rom, es fehlt die Kraft zu herrschen, die Fähigkeit zu leiten, die Gabe der eigenen Kultur. So borgt sich Russland denn überall Kultur, Anregungen, nimmt mit slawischer Geschmeidigkeit alles in sich auf, parliert wie Paris, lässt deutsche Einwanderer kommen, borgt Geld und Ideen von allen Orten. Und bleibt trotz scheinbarem neuem Reichtum und einem frischen, nur äusserlich aufgetragenen Europäertum doch immer Russland, das weiche und grausame, die Welt der Ekstasen und Scheusslichkeiten, der Verbrüderung und der Barbarei, der märchenhaften Verschwendung und des unausdenkbaren Elends. (NZZ 1913, qtd. in Moser 269)

25. Dürrenmatt, “Russland” 1; Dürrenmatt, “Die Mörderin” A caricature in the Nebelspalter (4.1898, qtd. in Kommission 81), an independent, satirical political weekly founded in 1875, even writes about “exterminating Russian anarchist weeds.” 26. Historian Alphons Thun, a late-nineteenth-century expert on Russian revolutionary movements, distinguishes between the three, but explains how, in an almost inevitable process of radicalization, Russian Nihilists became Anarchists became Terrorists (337). 27. The “Jewish element” was often described as truly foreign to Swiss or European culture (Neumann 98).

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28. The original text reads: “Wir wollen nicht russifiziert werden; wir wollen uns national entwickeln mit Ausmerzung jener eingedrungenen, fremden und verpestenden Elemente. Der Mord in Interlaken soll die Augen öffnen; er führt uns zum Schluss: Hinaus mit den Russen, sofern sich dies mit den Gesetzen unsers Landes und den internationalen Verpflichtungen vereinbaren lässt.” (Oberländisches Volksblatt, September 4, 1906, qtd. in Moser 282). 29. The original text reads: “Das Distanzgewinnen ist für uns Deutschschweizer besonders schwierig. Noch enger als der Westschweizer mit Frankreich ist der Deutschschweizer mit Deutschland mit sämtlichen Kulturgebieten verbunden” (Spitteler 9). 30. It should be noted that Switzerland, unlike France, subscribed to the jus sanguinis politics of citizenship. Consequently, of the 12 percent of foreigners in Switzerland, a majority had been born there. 31. It is not often acknowledged that so-called foreigners, especially German refugees, had been vital in getting the Swiss constitutional state off the ground in 1848. 32. See Whittaker 56. The Higher Women’s Courses were founded in 1878. In 1886, they were partially closed again. Most important, admission for Jewish women was more restrictive. 33. Collmer notes that the Tsar had been distrustful of the Swiss policy and their reputation of liberal decadence, and he suspected them of facilitating the revolution (123–24). 34. According to Wyss, the Maximalists did not claim responsibility for the assassination (25). Savinkov, however, maintains that Durnovo’s assassination had been organized by them (99). 35. See Neumann, 98. After crimes were committed by Russians in 1907 and 1908, newspaper campaigns described Russians as unworthy of asylum in Switzerland and advised universities to be more restrictive (Moser 294). Wecker notes that the expulsion of Russian students from Switzerland was demanded on a regular basis (88–89). 36. The original German text reads: “Denn so einer Frau sind nicht nur die Lieder von Wilhelm Tell ins Herz gedrungen, sondern auch die Taten von ihm. Oder glaubt der Herr vom Tagblatt, dass Wilhelm Tell den Gessler durch einen Kuss getötet hat?” (“Das Urteil” 1). 37. Tatiana’s case is published in the “Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society” from 1906 to 1908 and reproduced in Baynac (237– 44).

straight migrants queering european man Nacira Guénif 1. My deepest thanks to the editors for locating in the initial “chtonian” shape of my writing the material for the argument in this essay.

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2. This assertion should be considered alongside Nicole Loraux’s statement: “For immortal is the occidental soul (to state it is almost a tautology)” [Car immortelle est l’âme occidentale (l’affirmer tient à la limite de la tautologie)] (177). 3. Nicole Loraux and Edward Said both provide us, from their respective points of focus, seminal locations of otherness intertwining femininity and virility. For the former, the discursive construction of Man is the result of a series of translations, one competing with the other (Latour), all aiming at the purity of aner: From bastard to hero, hero to citizen, citizen to philosopher, all sustain one another as sites “where the virility only fully accomplishes itself by integrating some femininity” (où la virilité ne s’accomplit pleinement qu’en intégrant à soi du féminin) (173). Thus, Loraux points at Plato’s “twisted strategy by which the dialogical language reclaims—for the highest benefit of the generic philosopher—femininity that the thought pretended to have given back (with such a condescendence!) to women” [la stratégie retorse par laquelle la langue des dialogues se réapproprie—pour le plus grand bénéfice du philosophe générique—la féminité que la pensée faisait mine d’avoir rendue (avec quelle condescendance!) aux femmes] (217), hence denying its very power to Woman. The latter introduces us to the dis-oriented gaze of Occidentalization, which currently activates fictions of democratization and secularization, as opposed to Islam and the migrants who come from its various worlds. Said reminds us that “European interest in Islam derived not from curiosity but from fear of a monotheistic, culturally and militarily formidable competitor to Christianity. . . . An Islam which is viewed as belonging to a part of the world—the Orient— counterposed imaginatively, geographically, and historically against Europe and the West” (342– 43). 4. Similarly, Indians were not described as the conquerors of a continent even after it became known that they had reached it after incredibly challenging journeys. Only the Europeans who discovered these “Indians” before realizing that they had not reached the “West Indies” saw themselves as conquerors. On such puzzling thoughts, see Lévi-Strauss (78–81) and Marshall Sahlins. 5. Since then, activist groups such as ARDHIS (association pour la reconnaissance des droits des personnes homosexuelles et transsexuelles à l’immigration et au séjour) have addressed the specific issue of undocumented people with HIV and claims for their rights not to be deported. And even closer in the legislative agenda, the fundamental right for health care for migrants is under threat from the French parliament (http:// www.lequotidiendumedecin.fr/information /le-gouvernement-retablit-les -restrictions-au-droit-de-sejour-pour-soins; accessed February 17, 2011). See also: KUNTSMAN Adi, “The Currency of Victimhood in Uncanny

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Homes: Queer Immigrants’ Claims for Home and Belonging Through Anti-Homophobic Organising,” Journal of Ethnic And Migration Studies 35, no. 1, 2009. 6. Gender Apartheid in Iran: one million signature campaign: http:// www.youtube.com /watch?v=zo3ZflGFoVM&NR=1, less than 2000 viewings, in Persian (accessed May 5, 2009). Campaign for Equality: http://www .youtube.com /watch?v=v7wIXWZ1oWg&NR=1 (accessed May 5, 2009). Remise du Prix Simone de Beauvoir aux Deux Magots: http://www.youtube .com /watch?v=AWcRseXM6y0 (accessed May 5, 2009). queering european sexualities through italy’s fascist past: colonialism, homosexuality, and masculinities Sandra Ponzanesi 1. His films include C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other, 1974) a dramatic comedy on friendship and love and the challenges of postwar Italy, and Brutti sporchi e cattivi (Ugly, Dirty and the Bad, 1976), a comedy about everyday poverty. 2. The domestic sphere occupies the major portion of the film except for the opening scenes that focus on the events. 3. See also Gundle (1996; 2002). 4. Alfredo Rocco’s new legal code came into force in 1931. It strengthened the powers of the prosecution while curtailing individual rights in the name of state security. It also increased the number of offenses punishable by death. The Codice Rocco was amended several times but remained within the Italian legal system until the 1970s. See Finaldi (58). Although the criminalization of homosexuals did not materialize, gays were sent into internal exile and discriminated against. The exposure of homosexuals was used as blackmail by the secret police against certain men in power, including Prince Umberto II and Augusto Turati, former secretary of the Fascist Party. 5. For further details, see “La rispettabilità nel codice Rocco” (The Respectability of Code Rocco), http://www.museodelleintolleranze.it (accessed on December 8, 2009). 6. With the outbreak of World War II, Italy lost its colonial territories to the British (1941) through military defeat and diplomatic sanctions, rather than nationalist revolts by colonized people. This has repercussions on how Italian colonial history has been written and remembered. In Italy, both colonialism’s considerable violence and the shame of its defeat by Britain were repressed. See Rochat (1973), del Boca (1976 –86), Labanca (2002), Ben Ghiat and Fuller (2005), and Ponzanesi (2004). 7. Mussolini built not only the Foro Mussolini sport complex in Rome, to celebrate physical fitness and his obsession with “mens sana in corpore sano,”

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but also the Stadio dei Marmi, adorned with sixty enormous classically inspired statues of male athletes. The statues were paid for by Italy’s provinces and exemplified the fascist adoration of youth and of the male form. Some critics have pointed out the ostentatious display of masculinity that the statues symbolized. They were supposed to be admired not only by fascist girls, but also by certain sort of fascist men (see Cresti 1986). On the other hand, some perceptions claimed these statues had nothing homoerotic about them (Mosse). 8. Italy had always been ambiguous in its embracing of the Nazi model. On the one hand, fascist propaganda worked to create “la fabbrica del consenso” (the consensus factory) by depicting Rome as part of the great Aryan Empire; on the other hand, Mussolini’s fascist discourse relied on invocations of the great Roman Empire, which barbaric invasions from the North had weakened. 9. A historical account of homosexuals sent to the confino can be found in the unique work of Dall’Orto, “Per il bene della razza al confino il pederasta,” in Babilonia (1986, 14 –17). Dall’Orto has also conducted an interview with an ex-confined homosexual: “Ci furono dei ‘femmenella’ che piangevano quando venimmo via dale Tremiti!” (“Ci furono,” 26 –28). These writings can also be found in “La Gaya Scienza,” Dall’orto’s personal website on homosexuality and culture, http://www.giovannidallorto.com (accessed March 2010). Dall’Orto mentions Franco Goretti’s more comprehensive study on the subject (Goretti). 10. “ ‘Menomazione al prestigio della razza, essendosi abbandonato passivamente ad atti di pederastia con indigeno dell’Africa Orientale Italiana.’ In questo caso si noti come il problema non fosse tanto il contatto interrazziale in sé, né l’omosessualità in quanto tale, ma il fatto che il bianco avesse permesso che il ruolo ‘attivo,’ che nella cultura maschilista mediterranea è il ruolo del ‘dominante,’ fosse ricoperto da un ‘dominato.’ ” 11. Dall’Orto’s argument in the original Italian reads: Per settant’anni gli italiani avevano ripetuto che l’omosessualità era un vizio tipico da inglesi e da tedeschi, e ora proprio il fascismo avrebbe dovuto confessare l’incofessabile, e cioè che l’omossessualità esisteva perfino in Italia? Non stupisca insomma che le leggi razziali italiane non abbiano portato con sé nessuna legge anti-omosessuale: l’estensione della politica di ‘difesa della razza’ agli omosessuali a venne con misure amministrative, e non per mezzo di leggi ad hoc come nella Germania nazista. In pratica ciò che avvenne fu classificare come ‘confinati politici’ anzichè come ‘confinati comuni’ un’ottantina di omosessuali, o poco più. Tutto qui.

12. Dall’Orto’s conclusion in the original Italian reads: “Grazie a questo atteggiamento, che non è stato rinnegato con la caduta del fascismo, l’omosessualità è diventata, in Italia, il regno del non-detto, dei sussurri, degli

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eufemismi, dei giri di parole, dei volti nascosti: un mondo che c’è però non esiste, perchè non ha diritto ad affiorare alla realtà.” 13. John Dickie analyzes the stereotypical representation of the South in the post-Unification period (1999). The Mezzogiorno was widely seen as barbaric, violent, and irrational, an “Africa” on the European continent, while paradoxically integrated into the imaginary of the emerging nation. 14. Madamato or madamismo was the Italian term for the consorting of Italian men with local women through which Eritrean women effectively considered themselves married while there were no legal implications for their Italian counterparts. See Ponzanesi (2007). 15. Aldrich shows that the Mediterranean as a place of the manifestation of the homoerotic ideal of masculine beauty and virility is a recurring motif in gay literature and art between the 1750s and the 1950s. Aldrich’s examples include over 40 writers such as Thomas Mann, Lord Byron, Johann Winckelmann, and E. M. Forster. During this period, many homosexual writers left their Northern European homes to live in the Mediterranean, especially Italy. This fantasy of a gay-friendly Mediterranean lost its currency in the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of the gay rights movement in Northern Europe. 16. Duncan provides a novel reading of the relationship between homosexuality, nationality, and class within Europe. He shows that Italy attracts the upper-middle class aesthete, but it also draws aspiring rent boys from North Africa and the Balkan States convinced that Italian identity is imbricated in complex economics of class, national difference, and cultural capital. It is not just the case, however, that foreigners have got the wrong end of the stick. Northern Italian men project similar fantasies onto the South. All Southern Italian men, it is sometimes asserted, have sex with each other although none of them is gay . . . a kind of compensatory activity because the general backwardness of the South makes unmarried women sexually unavailable. The idea of the South as a pastoral haven of unfettered homoeroticism roots the region in a state of archaic underdevelopment. Modern or Northern visions of homosexuality . . . both long for and repress this sense of difference that might be termed racial as much as sexual for the object of desire is determined more by geography than gender. This example suggests that on a discursive level at least, homosexuality amongst Italians is not a transparent category. (Reading 4)

queer, republican france, and its euro-american “others” Lucille Cairns 1. The refusal of Matt to provide a patronym for a review that is entirely non-defamatory, and indeed generally laudatory while not undiscerning,

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seems to be an arguably queer resistance to the norms both of patrilineal heritage and of the academic/publishing industries. 2. The very place of publication outside Paris—Lille—suggests a restricted readership and influence, but this does not detract from the political importance of the publication as an example of queer community activism and discourse attempting, precisely, to reach a wider constituency. 3. As an instance of “verlan” (backslang), the word “beur” is not adequately translatable into English. It refers to a person born in France of North African immigrant parents. 4. Bourcier 10. As I write this essay in 2010, the undergraduate module on queer theory that Bourcier teaches at her home institution, the University of Lille II, seems to be an exception within the French university system. For modules or seminars devoted to queer specifically, one needs to look outside the French university system, to the Grandes Écoles / research institutes— and even here they hardly abound. In 2007, Bourcier inaugurated the first Masters seminar (forming part of the master genres et politiques) on queer at L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, where she also taught “Théories cultures et politiques queer” during the academic session 2008– 09. 5. http://admi.net /jo/20000607/INTX9900134L.html. It is important to note that while the law seeks to promote such equal access for women and men, it does not impose it; moreover, it does not apply to the Assemblée Nationale in which the French members of parliament sit. Its scope is therefore much more limited than was originally hoped by campaigners for it in the 1990s. 6. It should, however, be noted that Butler’s work has only been available in French relatively recently, so the impact of her ideas in France is developing. The French translation of Gender Trouble (Trouble dans le genre), for instance, did not appear until 2005, and that of Bodies That Matter (Ces corps qui comptent) not until 2009. The time lag between the publication of Undoing Gender in 2003 and of its French translation Défaire le genre in 2006 was, surprisingly, far shorter. 7. Since the publication of Sexpolitiques: Queer Zones 2, Bourcier has remarked, “à quel point l’ancrage socialiste français est prisonnier de son républicanisme universaliste. Sans doute plus que le libéralisme à la Sarkozy qui a compris la nécessité de l’action positive (l’Affirmative action que les journalistes français jouissent de mal traduire par ‘discrimination positive’), et c’est triste à dire” (the extent to which French socialist anchoring is a prisoner of its universalist republicanism. Probably more so than with Sarkozy-style liberalism, which has grasped the need for positive action [the Affirmative action that French journalists enjoy mistranslating as “positive discrimination”], and it’s sad to have to say it) (Bourcier 2007). 8. As Gayle Rubin’s later work and Butler’s introduction to Bodies That Matter are at pains to stress, poststructuralist analyses of gender, rather than

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erasing materiality, draw attention to the gap between materiality and its discursive apprehension. 9. Gay-bashing cases elsewhere in Europe around the same time include one committed in April 2005 in Amsterdam, considered by many to be the “gay capital” of Europe, against Chris Crain, who “ended up in hospital with a broken nose and badly bruised face” (Browne 2005). Sadly, there have been many more such cases since 2005. More recently, the “European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights said police in most countries were incapable of dealing with homophobic crime—ranging from verbal abuse to deadly attacks—and said many governments and schools failed to take it seriously enough” (Westall 2009). 10. Bertrand Delanoë’s attacker and would-be-killer, Azedine Berkane, declared to the police after the stabbing that he hated politicians, the Socialist Party, and homosexuals. Many in France hate politicians and the Socialist Party, but do not normally go so far as to stab them; emphasis on the homophobic motivation of the crime was thus entirely valid. 11. The remarks in Rubin and Butler (1994) on the crucial insertion of sexuality, lesbian sexuality in particular, into the feminist debates are highly pertinent here. sick man of transl-asia: bruce lee and queer cultural translation Paul Bowman 1. Another possible translation of these words could be: “One question, are you Chinese?” / “Our ancestors are the same, but our destinies are completely different . . . nothing you can compare with!” My thanks go to Luna Weihua Ye for helping me with this translation. Thanks also to Fan Yang and other members of the cultstud-l mailing list for offers of help and suggestions. 2. For a related discussion of the implications of this and of the discussion of Foucault in the paragraph that follows, see also Weber (xii). 3. Similarly, Weber reminds us of Bachelard’s reflections on the implications that contemporary science has for our understanding of knowledge: “All the basic notions can in a certain manner be doubled; they can be bordered by complementary notions. Henceforth, every intuition will proceed from a choice; there will thus be a kind of essential ambiguity at the basis of scientific description and the immediacy of the Cartesian notion of evidence will be perturbed” (Bachelard qtd. in Weber xii). 4. See Chambers and O’Rourke (2) for a recent discussion of the etymological, conceptual, and cultural connections between torsion and queering, and between queer studies and ethico-political torsions. 5. Elsewhere, he argues, “When the concept of modernity still implies ‘progress’ and ‘westernization,’ any translation or introduction of modern

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texts is by no means free from cultural imperialism” (Lo qtd. in Chow, Primitive 176). This claim by Lo is the very first quotation that Rey Chow makes in the essay “Film as Ethnography” on which I have been drawing here. 6. Lo describes the process thus: “The subtitles become a kind of verbal ‘stain’ that partially obscures the field of vision. It is like living in a world of comics, where one would continuously see one’s own speech and the speech of others” (Lo 50). 7. Ascheid argues that subtitled films construct a ruptured space “for intellectual evaluation and analysis” insofar as this confluence of features “destroys the usual unity between the spectator and the cinematic world he or she experiences” and “results in the perception of ‘difference’ rather than the confirmation of ‘sameness’ and identity,” which “potentially leads to a considerable loss of pleasure during the experience” (Ascheid, qtd. in Lo 56). 8. As Lo puts it: It has been well-documented in Western film guides and critical studies of Hong Kong films that the English subtitles are not viewed simply as troublesome but also as great fun for Western viewers. In the West, Hong Kong cinema enjoys great popularity among nonconformist subcultures—festival circuits, college film clubs, Internet fanzines, and fan groups—in which cult followers and lovers of camp celebrate the exploitation and peculiarities on display . . . its wild and weird subtitles further elevate the cinema’s fetishistic status and exotic flavor. The tainted object that obscures part of the screen and confuses the signification has been sublimated into a cult element by hardcore fans who look for off-center culture and down-market amusements. (Lo 54)

9. There are other possible renderings of the Chinese, however, such as “our ancestors are the same, but our destinies are completely different,” which, in referring to a shared ancestry rather than a shared present, could be taken to mean one of several different things. 10. These several senses of translation, treachery, and tradition all coalesce in the early scene of Fist of Fury. As we have seen, this scene—which initiates and initializes the action of the film —is dominated by an accusation: The Japanese declare that an unnamed addressee is the “Sick Man of Asia.” This is a brilliantly efficient insult, as it operates on all salient levels at once: This is the funeral of a Chinese martial arts master who apparently died of a sickness, so he was the sick man; but it is also directed to all Chinese, and equally to the nation of China, whose independence and powers had been drastically compromised by a wide range of foreign onslaughts. Reciprocally, of course, as Chan emphasizes, this is all organized through the other element of this copula: masculinity. Thus, the vocalization of the accusation of sickness on all levels comes at a moment of profound cultural crisis. China

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is in a weakened state—hence the presence of such powerful Japanese in Shanghai. The funeral is that of the traditional Chinese master. Moreover, the deceased master was also the actual founder. 11. The primary field of such twisting, turning, concatenation, and warping is, of course, that supposed “realm” (which could perhaps be rather better understood as the condition) called mass or popular culture. Thus, argues Chow: There are multiple reasons why a consideration of mass culture is crucial to cultural translation, but the predominant one, for me, is precisely that asymmetry of power relations between the “first” and the “third” worlds. . . . Critiquing the great disparity between Europe and the rest of the world means not simply a deconstruction of Europe as origin or simply a restitution of the origin that is Europe’s others but a thorough dismantling of both the notion of origin and the notion of alterity as we know them today. (193–94)

12. See Chow: Using contemporary Chinese cinema as a case in point, I think the criticism (by some Chinese audiences) that Zhang and his contemporaries “pander to the tastes of the foreign devil” can itself be recast by way of our conventional assumptions about translation. The “original” here is not a language in the strict linguistic sense but rather “China”— “China” as the sum total of the history and culture of a people; “China” as a content, a core meaning that exists “prior to” film. When critics say that Zhang’s films lack depth, what they mean is that the language/ vehicle in which he renders “China” is a poor translation, a translation that does not give the truth about “China.” For such critics, the film medium, precisely because it is so “superficial”—that is, organized around surfaces—mystifies and thus distorts China’s authenticity. What is implicitly assumed in their judgment is not simply the untranslatability of the “original” but that translation is a unidirectional, one-way process. It is assumed that translation means a movement from the “original” to the language of “translation” but not vice versa; it is assumed that the value of translation is derived solely from the “original,” which is the authenticator of itself and of its subsequent versions. Of the “translation,” a tyrannical demand is made: the translation must perform its task of conveying the “original” without leaving its own traces; the “originality of translation” must lie “in self-effacement, a vanishing act.” (Chow, Primitive 184)

13. She asks these questions not simply in the spirit of the post-structuralist, deconstructive, or anti-essentialist problematization of “essences” and fixed/ stable identities, but rather because of the extent to which many theories of

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translation focus exclusively on the “intralingual and interlingual dimensions of translation” (192) and hence miss the cultural significance “of intersemiotic practices, of translating from one sign system to another” (193). 14. This tradition, it should be noted, is not an exclusively Chinese tradition. It is, of course, always and already transnational—some might even say universal. It is transmissible, communicable. This is not the case with the question “Are you Chinese?” Such a question only means something barbed and precise within certain contexts. So, the switch, the non-translation transformation of the question “Are you Chinese?” into “Just what is the point of this?” is an act that clings to transmissibility rather than to truth. 15. In other words, actively involved in a complex dialectical identification akin to Hegel’s much (re)theorized dialectic of Lord and Bondsman, within which each of whose identities depends on (is constituted and compromised by) the other’s (mis)recognition. what’s queer about remy, ratatouille , and french cuisine? Laure Murat 1. “Brad Bird interview” from Ratatouille, “Deleted scenes,” bonus DVD. My emphasis. Directed by Brad Bird. Ratatouille. DVD Blue-Ray, Walt Disney Home Entertainment, 2007. 2. Colette evokes the figure of the great French chef Hélène Darroze, who was one of the main advisers for the movie and wrote a book about her professional struggle (2005). Darroze is the only female chef ever awarded two stars in the Michelin Guide. 3. Judith Halberstam, “ ‘Pixarvolt’: Animating Revolution” (2007). I graciously thank Judith Halberstam for allowing me to quote this paper from a lecture she gave but which is not yet published. 4. Rataouille is described as “A– Mets composé de divers ingrédients coupés en morceaux et cuits ensemble. B– 1/ Vieilli. Ragoût (mauvais) . . . grossièrement cuisiné. 2/ Au fig.: mélange hétéroclite. Synon. salad, salmigondis. Une vie se compose d’une sacrée ratatouille d’ingrédients. (Arnoux, Rhône, 203). . . . Étymol. et Hist. . . . Formé du croisement de tatouiller ‘remuer, manier beaucoup; renverser dans la boue’ et ratouiller ‘troubler (l’eau), secouer, remuer; salir’ ” (http://atilf.atilf.fr/dendien /scripts/tlfiv5/advanced.exe?8; s=2322958710, consulted July 2010). Instead of Arnoux’s quotation, I would rather propose this excerpt from Le Maboul by Fouad Laroui: “C’est quoi, la langue maternelle? La langue de la mère, tout simplement? Si c’est le cas, ce devrait être le marocain. Le seul problème, toutefois, est que le marocain n’existe pas. Ce que ma mère et quelques millions d’âmes parlaient dans ma jeunesse était une ratatouille de mots arabes, berbères, français, plus quelques mots d’espagnol et

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des ad hoc pour faire nombre.” (What is it, the mother tongue? Quite simply the language of the mother? If it’s the case, it should be Moroccan. The only problem, however, is that Moroccan does not exist. What my mother and a few million souls spoke of in my youth was a ratatouille of Arab, Berber, French words along with a few words of Spanish and some ad hoc to make up the numbers” (Laroui 90 –91; my translation). I thank Françoise Lionnet for this reference. 5. Nobody has ever seen François Simon’s face, despite the famous TV program he also runs. He comes incognito to the restaurants with a hidden camera and comments on what he is eating. The spectator sees the dish but never the person who tastes it. After Ratatouille’s release, his friends and nephews used to call him up on the phone, saying: “Hello! Anton Ego?” (Simon, Simon Says). 6. The film was seen by six million in the United States, and Bird pays an indirect tribute (or is it sarcasm?) to it by naming Colette, Colette Tautou (Audrey Tautou plays Amélie). pathos as queer sociality in contemporary european visual culture: françois ozon’s time to leave Emma Wilson 1. In the nuclear family of Sitcom, a father brings home a white laboratory rat whose strange influence apparently inspires his son Nicolas to come out to his family, sleep with the maid’s boyfriend, and engage in orgies in the family home; his daughter Sophie to indulge in sadomasochistic and self-destructive behavior; his wife to seduce her son; and the man himself to fantasize about shooting everyone else. 2. The scenes were originally longer, but as it stands, their relative restraint is also part of their appeal. Deleted material is available on the Artificial Eye DVD of Time to Leave. 3. While this may locate Ozon’s film particularly with reference to the French New Wave, to Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962) or Demy’s La Baie des anges (1963), Moreau’s presence in other European films, most notably Antonioni’s La Notte (1961), confirms her association with a broader range of European filmmaking and its cultural status. 4. Interestingly, the treatment of AIDS in recent cinema has largely been in a historical context, as in André Téchiné’s Les Témoins (2007) or Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s Nés en 68 (2008). 5. Moreau’s role as Duras is, of course, only one of those that led her to become Ozon’s Laura. Richard Armstrong (2009) has commented on the way Time to Leave references Moreau’s role in Jules and Jim (François Truffaut 1962). Here again, eroticism and mortality draw together where we learn

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that Catherine and Jim, in their encounter in the station hotel, appear in a moribund embrace, as if they were dead already, before they actually die together, fulfilling Laura’s later wish in Time to Leave. Moreau’s Catherine, in her sexual rapaciousness, appears a precursor to her later Laura, as indeed does her lovely Jeanne in the earlier The Lovers (Louis Malle 1958). 6. Late in the preparation of this essay I heard Michael Lucey’s talk, “Beauvoir, Duras, Context, Sexuality,” University College London, Department of French, January 20, 2010. Lucey offers a very different, and important, interpretation of sexuality in late Duras, drawing attention to the homophobia of a number of Duras’s comments. 7. For an alternative reading of this image and its relation to the mother in Camera Lucida, see Mavor, 141– 43. queer /euro visions Carl F. Stychin 1. Raykoff defines camp as “a performative practice invested in the rearrangement of power structures and values” (8). 2. Defined by Allatson as “a yearning to familiarise the exotic and to exoticise the familiar” (90). 3. As demonstrated some years ago in Britain during Channel 4’s gay magazine format television series Out, which “spiced up an item comparing the laws pertaining to homosexuality in the countries that make up the European Community. A worthy topic, but potentially dry as dust, so Out turned it into a mock-up of the Eurovision Song Contest” (Medhurst 86). 4. For example, the EU’s new Agency for Fundamental Rights has produced an extensive report (at the request of the European Parliament) on homophobia and discrimination for use in preparing a new, broadly based anti-discrimination law (EU Agency for Fundamental Rights). 5. For example, Eurovision is broadcast in Australia, where it has a large and devoted following (Douglas). 6. The group was named Sestre, and comprised Miss Daphne, Miss Emperatrizz, and Miss Marlena. 7. See Zielonka 69. In this regard, Williams describes the EU’s approach to human rights as “ironic” because of the gulf between the approach internally and externally to the EU, and because of the gap between universalizing rhetoric (deployed externally) and actual internal Community practice. See also Weiner. 8. The World Wide Web contains a plethora of complaints from viewers outraged by what they perceive to be unjustifiable results—in terms of “merit”— each year. This is instantly revealed by typing “Eurovision” and “outrage” into any search engine.

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9. See Delanty and Rumford 36. On the inside/out binary in queer theory and politics, see Fuss. 10. The performance of Russian girl duet t.A.T.u. at ESC 2003, in which the teenagers’ “lesbians affectations” were subsequently revealed to simply be a “commercial ploy,” provides a good example of this phenomenon in the contest (Heller 111). 11. Tobin 26. On the relationship of legal rights and responsibilities, sexual citizenship, and popular culture, see Cossman. 12. I am grateful to Marett Leiboff for pointing this out to me. 13. For example, for a fascinating analysis of the historical “whiteness” of Eurovision, see Mutsaers. 14. Her victory was certainly read widely (in some parts of Europe) as the product of regional bloc voting. 15. See Tzortzi. This is evidenced by the cancellation in September 2009 of a gay pride march in Belgrade “due to security concerns” (Lowen).

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contributors

Paul Bowman teaches cultural studies at Cardiff University, United Kingdom. He is author of Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies (2007), Deconstructing Popular Culture (2008), Theorizing Bruce Lee (2010), Culture and the Media (2012), and Beyond Bruce Lee (2013). He is editor of Interrogating Cultural Studies (2003), The Truth of Zˇizˇek (2006), The Rey Chow Reader (2010), Reading Rancière (2011), Rancière and Film (2013), and special issues of Parallax, Social Semiotics, and Postcolonial Studies. He is founding editor of JOMEC Journal and founder and director of Cardiff University’s Interdisciplinary Film and Visual Culture Research Centre (IFVCR). Lucille Cairns is Professor of French at Durham University, United Kingdom. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters, both on French women’s writing and filmmaking and on male and female homosexuality in French literature and film, as well as of five monographs: Marie Cardinal: Motherhood and Creativity (1992); Privileged Pariahdom: Homosexuality in the Novels of Dominique Fernandez (1996); Lesbian Desire in Post-1968 French Literature (2002); Sapphism on Screen: Lesbian Desire in French and Francophone Cinema (2006); and Post-War Jewish Women’s Writing in French (2011). She is also the editor of Gay and Lesbian Cultures in France (2002). She was President of the Association of University Professors and Heads of French from 2007 to 2010, and is currently the national representative for French on the University Council of Modern Languages, as well as a member of sub-panel 28 (Modern Languages and Linguistics) for the UK’s Research Excellence Framework 2014 exercise. Sudeep Dasgupta is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Culture, University of Amsterdam, and a researcher, affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Studies and the Amsterdam Center for Globalization Studies. He has published in the fields of critical theory and visual culture, aesthetics, Continental philosophy, postcolonial and queer theory, and globalization. He is editor of Constellations of the Transnational: Modernity, Culture, Critique (2007). 233

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Gary Ferguson is Elias Ahuja Professor of French at the University of Delaware, where he is also a Joint Faculty Member in the Department of Women’s Studies, and has been a Visiting Professor at the Universités Paris 13–Paris Nord, Rennes 2–Haute Bretagne, and Jean Monnet–SaintÉtienne. He has published widely on French medieval and early modern literature and culture, in particular in the areas of gender and queer studies, women’s writing, devotional poetry, and the history of religion. His most recent books include Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture (2008) and L’Homme en tous genres: Masculinités, textes et contextes (ed.), a volume of the journal Itinéraires. Littérature, textes, cultures (2008/2009). He is currently completing a study with the projected title “Like Man and Wife”? A (Hi)story of Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome. Dominique Grisard teaches Gender Studies and History at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Currently she is a Swiss National Science Foundation fellow at the New School for Social Research where she is working on her second book, a history of femininity, sexuality, and whiteness through and around the color pink. Grisard is the author of Gendering Terror, a history of the specter of the female terrorist in 1970s Switzerland and Germany (Campus 2011) and the editor of two anthologies on gender theory. She has also published on left-wing terrorism, the imprisonment of women in 1970s Switzerland, and on gender theory. Forthcoming articles include “Law as Gendered Narratives: Criminal Court Decisions against Left Wing Terrorists” and “Pink Prisons, Rosy Futures? The Prison Politics of the Pink Triangle.” Nacira Guénif is Associate Professor at the University Paris-Nord and a Senior Researcher at EA EXPERICE (Paris 13–Paris 8). A sociologist interested in migration, she specializes in race, gender, queer, postcolonial, subaltern, and cultural studies, and more specifically in family, intergenerational relations. She also focuses on biopolitics, power relations, and domination patterns. She is the author of Des “Beurettes” aux descendantes d’immigrants nord-africains (2000) and Les Féministes et le garçon arabe (with Éric Macé, 2006), and the editor of La République mise à nu par son immigration (2006). Laure Murat, professor in French and Francophone Studies at UCLA, is the author of La Maison du docteur Blanche (2001, Goncourt Prize for Biography), Passage de l’Odéon (2003), La Loi du genre (2006), and L’Homme qui se prenait pour Napoléon (2011, Femina Prize for non-fiction). She works on cultural history and history of ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth century, especially the history of psychiatry. Her other contributions are in

Contributors

235

gender studies, in particular on the notion of the “third sex” in French literature and police archives. She has participated in numerous conferences on feminist and gay and lesbian studies in France, Canada, and the United States. She was a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2005– 06), and was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for 2012–13. Sandra Ponzanesi is Associate Professor in Gender and Postcolonial Critique at the Department of Media and Culture Studies/Graduate Gender Programme, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She has published on post-colonial critique, transnational feminist theories, Italian colonial history, postcolonial Europe, digital diasporas, and postcolonial cinema. She is the author of Paradoxes of Post-Colonial Culture: Contemporary Women Writing of the Indian and Afro-Italian Diaspora (2004) and The Postcolonial Cultural Industry (forthcoming 2014), and editor of Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe (2005), Postcolonial Cinema Studies (2011), Deconstructing Europe: Postcolonial Perspectives (2011), and Gender, Globalisation and Violence: Postcolonial Conflict Zones (forthcoming 2014). Mireille Rosello teaches at the University of Amsterdam and, as a researcher, is affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and the Amsterdam Center for Globalization Studies. She focuses on globalized mobility (especially refugee discourse) and on queer thinking. Recent publications include Multilingual Europe, Multilingual Europeans, a collection of articles on multilingualism co-edited with László Marácz; The Reparative in Narratives: Works of Mourning in Progress; and France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters. Carl Stychin is Professor of Law and Social Theory at the University of Reading, United Kingdom. His areas of interest include law, sexuality, nationalism, religion, and globalization. He is the author of Law’s Desire: Sexuality and the Limits of Justice (1995), A Nation by Rights (1998), and Governing Sexuality (2003), as well as numerous articles. He was educated at the University of Alberta, Canada (BA 1985), University of Toronto ( JD 1988), and Columbia University in the City of New York (LLM 1992). He then moved to the United Kingdom to begin an academic career at Keele University before accepting a Chair at Reading in 1998. He is also the editor of Social & Legal Studies: An International Journal. Emma Wilson is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. Her

236

Contributors

publications include: Sexuality and the Reading Encounter: Identity and Desire in Proust, Duras, Tournier and Cixous (1996); French Cinema Since 1950: Personal Histories (1999); Memory and Survival: The French Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski (2000); Cinema’s Missing Children (2003); Alain Resnais (2006); Atom Egoyan (2009); and Love, Mortality and the Moving Image (2012). She is currently Course Director of the MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures at the University of Cambridge.

index

Abbas 118 abortion 62 Académie Française 110 activism 30, 36, 111, 172, 183, 200n5 adelphopoiesis 39 admissions policy 55 Adorno 19 affect 19 affrèrement 39, 42, 194n21. See also brotherhood Africa 15, 28, 85–89 Agency for Fundamental Rights 210n4 Ahmed 23 AIDS 4, 22, 74 –75, 200n5; in film 151–152, 158 Aldrich 89, 202n15 Alexander II, Tsar 61, 196n8 Allatson 210n2 alterity 9, 72, 90, 122, 130, 132, 207n11 Altman 6 ambivalence 20 anachronism 17, 27, 120 anarchist 58, 198n25 Anderson 28 Andrijasevic 2 anti-Americanism 110, 111 anti-discrimination 113 anti-Europeanism 2 anti-sexism 76 antisemitism 50, 58–59, 72, 86 Aragon 34 archaeological network 120 ARDHIS 200n5 Ascheid 123, 206n7 Asian East 28 Asiaphilia (film) 121 assassination 195n2 assimilation 99, 105 Assuncao 42

Aubenas 39 auto-affection 122 auto-Orientalism 182 Bachelard 205n3 Badinter 95 Bakunin 54 Balibar 3, 21 banlieue 102 barbarian 29, 59–61, 64 –65, 88, 174, 202n8 Barbarossa 29 Barnavi 2 Barthes 168 Basel 53 Bataille 150 Baynac 62, 195n1 Beauvoir 77 Beginnings 15 Bellay (du) 191n6 Benjamin 127–128 Bensaïd 14 Berco 41, 194n23 Berlin Wall 3 Bernabé 1, 189n1 beur 204n3 Bewes 18, 19 Bible 41 The Big Boss 132 bilinguality 127 Black Orpheus 189n5 blindness (color- and gender-) 76 Bloody Sunday 50 Bodies That Matter 5, 190n10 Boer 190n11 Bolognini 83 borders 21, 190n11; borderwork 21; of Europe 178 Boswell 39

237

238 Bourcier 91–114, 204n7 Bourdieu 110 –111 Bourguignon 138 Bowen 102 Braidotti 2 Bray 194n25 British Hong Kong 127 brotherhood 31, 36 –37, 39, 42, 44, 192n13 Brown 117 Browne 205n9 Bruno 193n14 Brupbacher 57, 197n20 Brussels 2 Burger 16, 17 burqa 101 Butler 5, 8, 52–53, 56, 90, 99–100, 107, 149, 153–155, 190n10, 203n6, 205n10 Byron 202n15 Camera Lucida 168–169 camp 111, 180 Carthage 89 Catholic 28, 31, 77, 89 Causse 108 Césaire 10 Chakrabarty 133 Chambers 121, 205n4 Chamoiseau 1 Chan 134 Charest 104 Chicago 12 China 117–135, 206n10 Chow 118, 120, 127–128, 130 –133, 207n11–12 Christianity 28, 71 citizenship and sexual politics 171, 173–176 La Citta delle donne 83 civilization: civilizing mission 77; the West and the Rest 15 class 53, 103, 107 closet 95, 109, 137–140 Cocklin 70 Codice Rocco 201n4 Collmer 58, 59, 59, 61, 64, 195n1 colonialism 3, 13, 28, 34, 47, 74, 84 –88, 92, 100 –103, 118, 126 –128, 132, 201n7. See also postcolonialism commodification 19, 21, 83, 118, 131 Common Market 30 comparison 120

Index compassion 148 Confiant 1 confraternity. See brotherhood conquistadors 29 constitution (European Union) 2, 113 contestation 94 contingency 5 Cooper 70 corps 104 Le Côté de Guermantes 169 Council of Trent 38 counter-culture 92 counter-hegemonic 76 Cowling 191n3 Cox 45, 194n33 Creoles 189n1 cultural encounters 18–20, 118, 118–121, 120, 131 curiosity 27 Dainotto 15 Dall’Orto 86 –89, 202n9 Dalmatia 39 Dana International 174, 175 Dandelet 34,, 192n11, 193n15 D’Annunzio 84 Darroze 208n2 Dati 77 D’Avray 193n19 Deam Tobin 173 Dean 176, 193n18 decadent 31 decolonization 72 deconstruction 9, 112, 132, 134, 207n11 decriminalization 30 defamiliarization 20 Delanoë 97, 106, 205n10 Delanty 191n3 Deleuze 92 democratization 200n3 denormalize 28 deportation 75 de-provincializing 133 Derrida 3, 92, 112, 122, 130 Desan 35 desire 108 despair 4 despotic regime 65 Détienne 74 dichotomy 88 disability 82, 88, 98

239

Index discrimination 88 dis-enchantment 1, 22 disguise 52 Di Sivo 192n13 dis-orientation 22–24, 200n1 dissent 20, 22, 29 La Dolce Vita 83 drag 31, 52, 53 Drôle de Felix 165, 166 Ducan 202n16 Ducastel and Martineau 150, 165–166 Duggan 53 Duncan 89, 203n16 Durnovo 49, 199n34 Dürrenmatt 196n11, 197n13 education 61 effeminate 129 Egypt 89 Elizabeth I 71 emergent concepts 10 empire 59, 61, 64, 202n8; Russian 48 encounters 8 Eng 189n4 entitlement 73 Epistemology of the Closet 139 equality 96, 97, 106, 112, 201n6 Eritrea 87, 203n14 essentialism 102, 104 ethico-political investment 121 Ethiopians 88, 89 ethnicity 74 EU anti-discrimination law 172 Europa 70 Europe: central and eastern 17; cinema 148–170; identity 20, 51; integration 171 Europe in Love, Love in Europe 18 European Broadcasting Union 173 Eurovision Song Contest 171, 176 excess 122–123 execution 37 exile 72 explosions 53 Fabre 99 Fanon 10, 11 fascism 81, 88, 89, 201n4, 202n8 Fassin 99, 189n6 Feller 54, 55 Fellini 83

female 94 femininity 51–53, 61, 66, 82, 84, 200n3; butch-femme 63, 196n5 feminism 4, 76, 77, 94 –95, 102–104, 108, 109; French 78, 95 femmeninity 196n6 Ferdinand and Isabella 34 Ferenczi 2, 189n3 Finland 196n4 Fist of Fury 117 Fitzpatrick 185 Foerster 112 Foro Mussolini 201–202n7 Forster 202n15 Fortress Europe 3, 71 Foucault 47, 92, 120, 205n2 Foucher 11 Fouz-Hernandez 17 France 35, 39, 60, 69–78, 91–113, 136 – 47, 148–70 Francis I 29 Freccero 190n2, 195n37 free love 57, 62, 67 French cuisine 136 French Queer Cinema 150 Freud 65, 155 Fuller 201n6 Gagliardi 54 –55, 59, 197n14 Geneva 53 geography 7, 15, 30 Germany 31, 87 Germi 83 Gide 89 globalization 6; of human rights 172 Goldberg 195n37 Gontran 10 Goretti 202n9 Governing Sexuality 172 Gramsci 15 Greece 89 Greer 186 –187 Gregory XIII 34, 192n11 Grendler 193n13 Guibert 166 –167 Gundle 201n3 Gunduz 3 Gunther 96, 97 Habchi 102 Habermas 3

240 Halberstam 52, 142, 189n4, 197n16 Halperin 6 Hampton 29, 191n5 Haritaworn 11 Harootonian 14 –15, 17 Hartmann 195n37 Hay 191n3 Hegel 208n15 Hellenism 71 Hennessy 21 Heptaméron 193n19 Herdt 8 heteronormativity 8, 75, 134 hijab 100 –101. See also veil Hitler 82 Hoad 64 homo-eroticism 85, 135 homophobia 84, 88, 106, 201n6, 201n4, 205n9, 205n10 homosexuality and nationalism 175–176 Hong Kong cinema 122 Honoré 150 humanism 28 humanitarianism 60 human rights 30, 106 Hungary 29 Hunt 118, 121, 134 Husserl 3, 4 Hutcheson 8 hybridity 9, 21, 69 immigration 58, 60 –61, 73, 98, 100 –103, 200n5 imperialism 69, 118, 133, 206n5 Imre 19 Indians 200n4 infiltration 58, 63–65, 68 In Praise of Creoleness 1 integration 73, 105 integrity 71 Interlaken 49, 51, 58–59 intersex 104 intolerance 29 invisibility 28, 69, 84 Iran 200n6 Iraq 13 Islam 76, 200 Islamic headscarf 101 Islamophobia 3, 72 Istanbul 28

Index Italian Resistance 189n2 Italy 18, 39, 81–90 Jameson 9 Japan 50, 117–132, 206n10 Japanese colonialism 127 Jews 88 jus sanguinis 199n30 Kafka 128 Kato 117, 118 Klonaris 92 Knight 62 Kruger 16, 17 Kulpa 17 Labanca 201n6 Lacan 92, 122 Laroui 208–209n4 Latour 200n3 Lauretis 4, 6, 90 Lavrov 54 Lee 117 legibility 6, 21, 97 Le Goff 191n3 Leontieva 48–78 Lestringant 29 Lévi-Strauss 11–12, 200n3, 200n4 linguistic queering 110 Lo 121–124, 127, 206n5, 206n8 Loraux 71, 200n2–3 Loren 81 Lowe 193n18 Mace 75 Madamato 203n14 Mangeot 75 Mann 202n15 Marcocci 194n24 marginality 9, 21 Marinetti 84 marriage 33, 66 –67, 77; history of 193n18 Marxist 107 masculinity 55–58, 61, 87, 89, 117, 134, 196n5, 197n16, 202n7. See also virility Massad 30, 75 Mastroianni 81–83 materialism 111 Mathieu 107 Le Matin de Paris 51, 196n3

241

Index matrimony 192n9 Matt 91, 202n1 McHugh 53 medicine 54, 66,196n3 Mediterranean 15, 29, 39, 88, 202n15; catholic 88 Meijer 54, 196n8 melting pot 142 Middle Ages 16, 38 migrants 3, 5, 21, 131–132, 200n5 military 5 Minning 17 minority 90 Montaigne 28–29, 31–33, 39– 40, 45, 191n5 Moors 8, 34 Moreau 160 Morin 3 Morris 117 Moser 58, 59, 195n1, 197n12, 198n21 Mott 42 Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) 108 Movimento Federalista Europeo 189n2 Müller 49 multiculturalism 113 Munoz 189n4 Muslim 30, 98, 101, 101; in Morocco 192n10 Mussolini 81, 84 –85, 201n7 Nagel 163 Naples 40 – 41 national identity 51, 60, 63, 66, 68, 70, 72, 193n15 nationalism 28–29, 53, 59; and empire 47, 86, 88, 128–133, 202n8; and postnationalism 3, 16, 18, 48, 84, 189n2 naturalization 52 Navarre 193n19 Nazism 81, 88, 202n8 Negritude 10 –11 neorealism 81 Neumann 54, 59, 66, 196n8, 198n22 new (and old) 1, 11, 13–14; new Europe 13 New World 28 New York 12 Nietzsche 128

non-human 137 Norton 194n25 Nouchet 105 Occidentalization 200n3 Of Cannibals 29, 31 old (and new) 1, 11, 13–14 oppositionality 112 Orano 193n14 Order of Things 120 orientalism 71, 121, 131 origin 132–134 O’Rourke 121, 205n4 The Other Heading 3 Ottoman 28 Ozon 148–151, 157–158 Pacs, pacs (pacte civil de solidarité) 39, 99, 112 Pamuk 2 parity law 97, 99, 112 parody 41 parricide 65 Pasolini 82 Passerini 18 passing 51–53, 61–62, 86, 129 passivity 36, 42– 43, 87 Pastor 34, 192n11 pathos 148, 151 patriarchy 76, 108 persecution 32 Petrovna 66 Philip II of Spain 33, 192n11, 194n30 Pièta 162–163 Pixarvolt 142 Plato 200n3 Polish king 35 popular culture 117–119, 124, 130, 132, 134 populist 110 pornography 92 Portugal 31, 42 Portuguese 34 post–9/11 world 49 postcolonialism 69, 72, 94, 101, 118–119. See also colonialism postfeminism 94 post-Franco Spain 34 postnationalism 3 poststructuralism 104 Prashad 117, 118

242 Pratt 53 Precarious Life 149, 153–155 pre-modern 27 print-languages 28 private ceremonies 44 Protestant 28, 31 Proust 169 Provencher 17 provincialization 73, 133 Puar 11 queering 121 queer relationality 151 Queer Theory: and activism 7, 105; and culture 18–19; and normativity 9, 83; origin of 4, 6, 10, 13, 92, 104, 109, 121; Post-Queer Politics 189n4 quotas 98 race 59, 69, 84 Ratatouille 136 –147 reason 4 recognizability 6, 21, 97 reconciliation 2, 3 re-enchantment 1, 22 Rees-Roberts 151–152 Reformation 28, 193n20 refugees 3, 5, 60, 64, 196n10, 197n12, 199n31 Reich 83 religion 31, 76 Renaissance 15, 27, 84, 190n2 reontologization 98 republicanism 91–93, 94, 96, 100 –101, 109, 112–113, 197, 203n7 repudiation 9, 77 resterners 15 revolution 57–58, 62, 64, 197n20 Reynolds 193n18 Riggenbach 64 Rocco 84 –85, 201n4 Rochat 201n6 Rocke 194n23 Roma 82 Romania 30 Rome 12, 28, 31–32, 89, 190n2 Romeo 194n24 Rose 22 Rossi 189n2 Rubin 203n8, 205n10

Index Ruffolo 189n4 Rumsfeld 13 Russia 15, 48, 35, 54 –55, 60, 199 Sahlins 200n4 Said 15, 71, 200n3 Saint John at the Gate 195n35 Saint Petersburg 50 same-sex 30, 85; marriage 28, 31, 32, 45 190 sans papiers 75 Sao Paulo 12 Sarkozy 15, 16, 146, 203n7 Sartre 189n5 Savinkov 62 Scaramella 194n26 Schehr 75 Schengen 3, 16, 71 Schiller 64 secularism 101, 200n3 security era 49 Sedgwick 8, 10, 84, 90, 138, 190n7, 194n28 seduction 58 Senghor 10, 189n5 Serduchka 180, 181 Sergi 88 Serifovic 186, 187 Sexual Nationalisms conference 189n6 sexuality 69, 74; and ambiguity 27 Sitcom 209n1 Social Text 189n4 sodomy 39, 42, 96 A Song for Europe 173 Spackman 84 Spain 17, 39, 193n15 Spinelli 189n2 Stasi 100 stereotype 64 Stites 61 Stoler 70, 85 Story of Tatiana 195n1 strike 57 Studer 57 subtitles 121–125, 206n7 Suleiman 29 Sullivan 109, 188 Surkis 72, 77 Suzanne et Louise 166 –167 Switzerland 48–68; national identity 54, 64

243

Index Taras 3 Téchiné 150 Tell (William) 64 –66, 199n36 Tendencies 190n7 Teo 118 terrorism 48, 57, 59, 198n26 Thomadaki 92 Thun 198n26 Tiepolo 32–33, 36, 40, 192n9 Time to Leave 148 tolerance 32 torture 46 Tracking Europe 23 tradition 130 transgender 92, 98, 105 translation 118, 206n9; translator as traitor 129, 206n8 transmissibility 128–131, 208n14 Tribune Russe 49 Tristes Tropiques 11 Tulchin 39 Tunis 29 Turcotte 109 Turkey 2, 28–30, 35

Ventotene Manifesto 189n2 verlan 203n3 Verstraete 23 victimization 105, 133, 106, 200n4 Vienna address 3 Vienna Psychoanalytic Society 65, 199n37 virility 82–85, 200n3, 202n15. See also masculinity visibility 53, 56, 74, 93 Vitoria 47

Uncertain Territories 190n11 undocumented migrants 71, 74, 200n5 Undoing Gender 53,190n10 universalism 70, 76, 78, 91–94, 112 university 66

xenophobia 3, 84, 90

Varda 167 Vattimo 128 veil 101–102

Walker 52, 53 Walter 109 Warner 37, 43– 44, 194n33 Wars of Religion 191n4 Weber 205n3 Westall 205n9 Whittaker 61–62, 196n38, 197n19 Wilde 89 Winckelman 202n15 Witte 193n18 World War II 201n6 Wyss 50, 199n34

Young 85 zemstvo doctors 196n9 Zielonka 174, 177 Zˇizˇek 122, 154 Zurich 53, 197n14