In the limelight: French women from the banlieues on stage in Ahmed Madani’s F(l)ammes (2017)

Abstract

This article considers how French theatre has contributed to debates on the condition of women living in the banlieues in a post-2015 context of terrorist attacks and a nationwide state of emergency. Focusing on the play F(l)ammes (2017) by Ahmed Madani, which interrogates women’s lived experiences, this article examines how theatre, drawing upon psychotherapeutic practices, engages with the complex interweaving of race, class and gender in marginalised French urban spaces. Using Nacira Guénif-Souilamas’s analysis of women from the banlieues and Stuart Hall’s work on the negotiation of multiple identities, this article suggests that F(l)ammes and the acting workshops from which it emerged eschew mass media representations of the French banlieues as violent, dangerous territories and offer an unusual, women-centred counter-discourse on the French nation.