Sex, France, and Arab Men, 19621979 by Todd Shepard;

Author:Todd Shepard; [Shepard, Todd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-49330-5
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

When Sodomy Became a Site for Rethinking Power

The basic elements of this debate, notably the image of “l’arabe au sexe-couteau,” have remained pregnant with implication in French popular discussions. Since the late 1980s, as well, many of the analytic claims about the act of sodomy have reemerged in anglophone scholarship that theorizes AIDS, anal sex, and the “queer.” Yet these authors ignore the imperial and racialized foundations of the claims they deploy. What disappeared over the course of the1970s was why, together, the intersections of post-decolonization masculinity and sodomy had seemed meaningful, propitious for thinking differently about politics and power.7

The ’70s sodomy vogue, like other aspects of the sexual revolution, stretched well beyond France. The international popularity of the Bernardo Bertolucci film Last Tango in Paris (1972)—and the excited commentary on “the butter scene” (in which the character played by Marlon Brando sodomizes the character played by Maria Schneider) that accompanied its travels—is the most obvious reminder of this forgotten phenomenon. It took on a particular role in France, however, notably in how it shaped political and theoretical efforts to think about power. The modern history of sodomy in France—the fact that the concept disappeared from French legislation under Napoleon, and the particularly important place of “enculé” in French invectives—surely affected this 1970s history.8 Yet the way that Arab resonances played out mattered more. They rang with revolution.

After decolonization, the metaphor of sodomy was weighted with the somewhat dirty implications of imperial invasion and expulsion, of shame, of pain, and of revenge, but also of unexpected possibilities of pleasure, of intense connections. This resulted from the unexpected shock of post-1945 anticolonial uprisings, the violence that ensued, and anticolonial victories, the revolt of “the wretched of the earth”—especially the Algerian revolution. Most French leftists had seen little of political interest in this nationalist “bourgeois” struggle, and vigorously rejected its supposedly ignoble weapons, most especially terrorism. In response, “Third-Worldism,” which Frantz Fanon’s analyses of the Algerian situation inspired, privileged the radical potential of the dialectic “colonized-colonizer” over that of the coupling “proletariat-bourgeoisie.” Algeria’s unexpected triumph encouraged radical observers to turn to such novel interpretive schemas as they sought to reproduce similar victories in the name of the oppressed. Far-right actors, too, worked to reposition their movement in response to what they viewed as a shocking humiliation, something outside the natural order of things. Actors in both these post-1962 discussions, the evidence reveals, seized on sodomy to conceptualize what this unanticipated situation meant about power and human relations. This made it newly ripe to reenvision the workings of history and power.

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