Queer@King's hosts Professor William J Spurlin for this talk exploring queer migration as represented in recent Francophone literature from the Maghreb, where authors such as Eyet-Chékib Djaziri (Tunisia) and Nina Bouraoui (Algeria) write about their emigration from their Maghrebian homelands to France. Not only does their writing queer the efficacy of mapped geopolitical borders and contrived notions of national/cultural hegemony contained within them, it also destabilises the binary thinking that structures the social categories of race, gender, sexuality, and class in staging intercultural encounter as ‘a space between.’ This lecture argues that being positioned in the space between two distinct cultural worlds, between Africa and Europe, enables the negotiation of new forms of racial, gender, and sexual difference.

The work of this new generation of authors from the Maghreb points to the fallacy of assuming, for example, a Mediterranean model of active/passive sexual relations between men as a marker of absolute difference between the sexual epistemologies of Arab Muslim cultures and the West. To assume that distinct sexual subjectivities arise naturally from a geopolitical binary misses the complex layerings of homoerotics being negotiated in polyvalent spheres of possibility, pleasure, and prohibition through translocation and transcultural negotiation. It also ignores the currents of sexual knowledge and desire flowing in multiple directions (Boone, Homoerotics of Orientalism); and produces a fantasised cartography of the world marked by problematic relations of equivalence and sameness between geographical spaces and (queer) sexual practices.

About the speakers

Professor William J Spurlin

William J Spurlin is Professor Emeritus and Honorary Professor of English & Comparative Literature at Brunel University, University of London. Previously, he was Professor of English at the University of Sussex, where he directed the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence & Cultural Change. Professor Spurlin has written extensively on the politics of gender and sexual dissidence and is widely known for his work in queer studies. His recent monograph, Contested Borders: Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb (2022), examines new representations of dissident sexualities in recent autofictional writing from the Maghreb, where long-established traditions pertaining to gender and sexuality are brought into contact with new forms of gender and sexual difference. His other publications include Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism (2009), the co-edited volume Comparatively Queer: Interrogating Identities across Time and Cultures (2010) and over 60 essays in international journals and anthologies. Professor Spurlin has given invited lectures around the world on queer studies, queer Holocaust studies, postcolonial studies, and translation studies in English and in French. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. For the outstanding contribution of his research in queer studies to social science scholarship, Professor Spurlin was named a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (2017) and Principal Fellow of Advance HE (2016) in recognition of exceptional leadership in teaching and scholarship on queer pedagogy.

Dr Ros Murray

Ros Murray is Senior Lecturer in French in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at King's College London.