Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed’s performance of universal French citizenship and good Muslim brotherhood

Abstract

This article builds on scholarship in performance studies, anthropology, discourse analysis and French studies by examining the performative speech acts of self-identified Maghrebi-French queer men from my recent fieldwork in France. As a point of departure, I draw on José Estaban Muñoz’s notion of ‘disidentification’ (1999) and Mireille Rosello’s notion of ‘declining the stereotype’ (1998) to examine the strategies of resistance for Maghrebi-French queer speakers who ‘work on and against dominant ideology’ and who try ‘to transform cultural logic from within’ a dominant system of identification and assimilation (Muñoz, 1999: 11–12). In my analysis, I examine an interview with one of my Maghrebi-French interlocutors, Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, founder of several French associations including Homosexuels musulmans de France (HM2F), and the author of Le Coran et la chair (2012), to show how his speech acts function simultaneously from within contemporary France – and its notion of laïcité – and from within Islam and the Prophet’s own dynamic approach to the Quran, to reinvent both the ‘universal French citizen’ and the ‘good Muslim brother’. Zahed’s story will help us to see how sexual and religious minorities must ‘straddle competing cultural traditions, memories, and material conditions’ and devise ‘a configuration of possible scripts of self/selves that shift according to the situation’ (Manalansan, 2003: x) in order to be heard in contemporary France by their families of origin, their fellow citizens and their Muslim brothers and sisters.