“What Is a Man?”: Queer Masculinities in North African Literature

The last ten years have seen a burgeoning body of literary texts that focus on queer masculinities in Francophone North Africa. Writers like Rachid O., Abdellah Taïa and Eyet-Chékib Djaziri have composed novels that portray what it means to be a gay man within sociocultural spaces in which Islam is felt in almost all facets of social life, be they private or public. This chapter sets out to examine the implications of being gay in Arab-Muslim societies through an analysis of how gay characters in the novels of selected Maghrebian writers negotiate their masculinity, which is considered “unmanly” and is often equated to femininity. This chapter engages with Lahoucine Ouzgane’s theoretical work on Islamic masculinities and diverse other critical readings in gender and sexuality studies. Through textual analysis, this chapter thinks through what it means to be a man in Arab-Muslim societies and whether sexual orientation influences the definition and/or constitution of masculinity. This chapter ultimately examines how the selected literary texts challenge the traditional definition of masculinity as strong, dominating and unemotional and in so doing propose new ways of thinking about masculinity and manhood.