Donna McCormack  (University of Leeds)
What are Ethics? Reading Francophone Embodiment Through Anglophone Queer Postcolonial Theory

Tahar Ben Jelloun, a Moroccan-born Francophone author, writes on issues of sexed embodiment in postcolonial Morocco. The representation of the gender-changing protagonist Ahmed/Zahra in his best-known novels L'Enfant de sable and La Nuit sacrée has been read by many critics as an allegory of, specifically, Morocco's experience of independence and, more generally, the postcolonial condition. These postcolonial readings of the novels focus on the body whilst at the same time wiping out the possibility that an embodied experience of ambiguous gender could be a viable form of existence in a postcolonial space. That is, Ahmed/Zahra's body is constrained back into a heteronormative paradigm of the nation where s/he serves to question the unjust treatment of women and, potentially, men in North Africa but never comes into being as a liveable body.

This simultaneous bringing into being and disavowing of the existence of gender-ambiguous bodies in a North African context is striking in both the Anglophone and Francophone material available on Ben Jelloun's works. Is it only in light of recent works by Anglophone theorists such as Sara Ahmed, Laurent Berlant, Judith Butler, Gayatri Gopinath, Judith Halberstam and Jay Prosser that it is possible to reflect on the potential of reading these novels as about sexed postcolonial embodiment? Moreover, has the resistance, if it can be so called, to exploring this potential been played down as inappropriate in a Francophone Moroccan context where it is often stated that queer has no place and where some might suggest there are more pressing political issues? Would such a reading, thus, impose Anglophone theories that could potentially ignore the specificities of the Francophone Moroccan context? Or is it possible to suggest an alternative reading that does not disavow the existence of gender ambiguity in a postcolonial context whilst keeping in mind the specifics of this cultural and historical context?

Since their inception as academic disciplines, queer theory and postcolonial theory have proven to be self-reflexive, ethically responsible praxes. Reading Ben Jelloun's novels through contemporary queer postcolonial theory addresses whether it is possible to have an ethical encounter with a text or whether there is always a form of violence that is committed against a text. Through this queer postcolonial reading I want to suggest that Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial theorists have to address the constraints they place on bodily boundaries through discourses of the nation. In bringing to the fore the possibility of postcolonial sexed embodiment as an experience of ambiguity rather than certainty I do not want to remove such a representation from its historical context. Rather I want to suggest that the violence within these novels is one way towards potentially producing other forms of less violent and less restrictive postcolonial bodily and spatial boundaries.