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Sign me up. Update your browser for the best experience. This cover image for a special insert in the Trotskyist weekly Rouge was one of numerous far-left celebrations of the Arab world as new revolutionary homeland. The public conversation about sex and Arabs stretched far beyond the far left. The active interest of right-wing voices in these questions indeed reminds us that such recriminations against Arabs did not simply emerge full-born from popular prejudices or historical precedents.
Efforts to advance reactionary political claims rehearsed, stoked, and spread decidedly pernicious attacks. In response, the editor-in-chief of Minute , a far-right weekly, offered an alternate depiction of the concerned French men and women whose meeting the Tunisian director had staged.
He added one final element to this chain of stereotypes, and it was the most important: the rejection by those Frenchmen of what Brigneau termed the vigor of Arab sexuality. Most of his concerns focused on the external, on infringements on French sensibilities and senses. Yet this last, right after he summoned the image of children, located the problem as a difference in kind, a threat inherent to the Arab man, which menaced intimate boundaries, French families, and the nation.
The supposed sexual threat that Arabs posed to the French was foundational to post far right efforts to re-enter mainstream discussions. All the important elements in this fringe of French politics had embraced the defense of French Algeria until the bitter end. To this end, many had supported a terrorist group, the Secret Army Organization OAS , that from early used deadly violence in both Algeria and France in an effort to overthrow the government of Charles de Gaulle.
Few repudiated such choices, which had deeply discredited the far right. Their attempts to reestablish a foothold in French political institutions would have to wait until after —when the National Front founded in began to win some seats—but their efforts to insert an argument about Arab men and sex into public debates had immediate and durable purchase, and laid the groundwork for electoral success.
Public debates deployed sex and sexuality in ways that offered the French people a chance to assess, evoke, and even to analyze histories and memories of French Algeria, the war, and empire. To map the potent intersections of empire and sex, each chapter of this book explores one key public debate.
These focus successively on the far right, gay liberation, debates about prostitution and so-called social Catholics, the sodomy vogue of the s, and how the question of rape shaped far left and feminist politics.
This history provides a new perspective on the French sexual revolution. Recently, historians have struggled to bring detailed cultural histories into dialogue with wide-lens global histories: this book offers one model. In broad terms, the French sexual revolution and French controversies about sex in the s and s can be fruitfully mapped onto a transnational chronology of crises and evolutions, a global movement that produced clear parallels in other countries in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, for example.
Yet, as this book shows, what was particular here—what made these controversies French rather than Western or late modern —were the central roles that invocations of Arab men and Algeria played in them and the ways that such invocations altered the contours and, at key moments, the substance of debates about contemporary sexuality.
What I term the erotics of Algerian difference allowed French men and women to grapple with the unstable boundaries of nation and identity in the post-decolonization moment. During the Algerian revolution, anticolonial activists, most of them Maghrebis, engaged issues of sex and gender that would be at the heart of the sexual revolution. Their arguments against torture or in response to French claims about the Islamic veil made clear that sexual norms, too, were colonial in nature, even as the larger struggle they were part of offered analyses and arguments to challenge them.
The influence of these arguments on subsequent French discussions makes the post erotics of Algerian difference somewhat distinct from the longer history of sexual Orientalism, of which it is a part.
Sexual liberationists, notably homosexual revolutionaries and feminists—such as Catherine Deudon, a photographer and writer, who in blamed hetero colonialism for ongoing lack of attention to lesbian concerns—had proved attentive students; extreme right activists, in turn, were harsh and early critics. The crucial context was immigration, and discussions of the erotic relationship of France and the French to Algerian men shaped claims and framed disagreements between the right and the left.
To misuse Freudian terminology, all engaged the unspoken question of whether the libidinal links between Algerian men and the French were to be repressed through demonization, or cathected through emulation or objectification. Talk of sex and desire helped French observers think through post relationships, real as well as imagined, between Algeria and France and between Maghrebis and French people. Decolonization, many had presumed, would shrink connections. Somewhat surprisingly however, international links between Algeria and France seemed to grow more important rather than less after the war of independence.
In and , the so-called Arab oil embargo sparked much criticism, as mainly Arab states in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries OPEC sought to persuade other countries to support Arab demands against Israel by leveraging access to oil. The unexpected economic crisis, which began to preoccupy French commentators at just that time, intensified negative reactions.
Together, these events seemed to explain the new prominence of anti-immigrant arguments and their anti-Arab valence. Both were visible in a series of government decisions from the Marcellin-Fontanet circular, which drastically increased legal limits on the rights of immigrant workers, to the July circular that suspended the immigration of all workers and members of their family. In this context, innumerable commentators consistently turned to sex to evoke, assess, or castigate Franco-Arab connections.
Of course, there was no obvious relationship between the economics of oil supplies and sex. As this book demonstrates, the economic context nevertheless intensified the circulation of sex talk about Arabs, which was already dense with meaning, and helped certain arguments crystallize. Most such sex talk concerned Algerian or Arab men, in part because the vast majority of the large numbers of Algerians in France were young men.
A police report submitted to the Ministry of the Interior claimed that, as it concerns Algerians. Among their French neighbors, the expressions they adopt range from fear to distrust to diffuse hostility and a priori rejection. Most important was how successful anticolonial critics had been in positioning the revolutionary or heroic Algerian man as the embodiment of universal and true manliness, a figure who had confronted the overwhelming force—and the sadistic unmanly tactics, notably torture—of France, and freed his nation and family from colonial oppression.
The prestige and aura of this figure, now only a historical memory in France, fashioned political thought in the s and s. For others, first and foremost far-right activists, this meant that the need to reject both such claims and an Algerian presence on French territory, alongside or with French people, could appear quite pressing.
Both contributed to how immigration, and Arab immigration above all, became an important political topic over the course of the s and s. Figure 2. Figure 3. By the end of the s, most on the left had become too wary of invoking Arab men as models. Numerous controversies had made leftists too concerned about the many complications such references implied.
Subsequent efforts to think about the politics of coalition, intersectionality, or the like ignore these earlier discussions, which invoked similar terms. Yet the far right continued to talk about sex and Arabs to advance their agendas, and proved equally adept when Islam and the Muslim woman reemerged as crucial references. What disappeared around was an intense conflict between certain French people about different ways that connections between Arab men and sex could be understood.
On one side were those who argued that, precisely because of their specific history—a history in which French colonialism and anticolonial resistance had played crucial roles—Arab men offered the solution to a variety of French problems. On the other were those who argued that Arab men were emblematic of all the problems that Arabs continued to wreak on France and the French. The first perspective has faded. The second, much evidence suggests, has become even more influential.
But looking back, it is clear that the claim by numerous scholars that the French forgot the Algerian war until the early s is false. This book relies on sex talk as evidence, and seeks to historicize it with as little voyeurism and as little prudery as possible. It does so to show how much specific histories shaped how sex was lived even as sex, in turn, shaped what it meant to be French, Arab, or Franco- Arab in France.
Not just any history, but very difficult, recent, and threatening histories of empire: their striking effects emphasize how necessary it is to analyze both the history of sex and how sex changed history.
Multiple chapters of this book explore the damaging efficacy of efforts to assert that links between sexual acts which included sodomy, rape, and venal sex and identities never just sexual or sexed, but also racialized, national, and even class are natural, essential, and unchanging—without history. Others chart the risky possibilities opened up through attempts to think about the same acts and identities historically and politically, and why and how these efforts faded from view. Some do both. Both wide-ranging sources and specific methodological choices anchor the multiple challenges this history poses to extant understandings of the sexual revolution and of the s and s more broadly.

I focus on debates that had widespread public resonance, and on discussions that have been central to existing scholarship on the sexual revolution. My interpretations attend more to the exemplary—the oft-repeated, the seemingly self-evident—than to the exceptional. Diverse types of sources inspired them. In addition to archived government documents, I explored print media periodicals, pamphlets, and books and numerous fictional works.