Contested Borders broadens understandings of dissident sexualities in Africa through focusing specifically on the Maghreb where gender/sexual politics have emerged under a different set of historical, material, and ideological conditions compared with sub-Sahara Africa, which has been the focus of much of the scholarship on African sexualities. It examines new representations of same-sex desire emerging in new francophone life writing, memoir, and literature from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, where long-established traditions pertaining to gender and sexuality are brought into contact with new forms of gender and sexual dissidence, resulting from the inflection of globally-circulating discourses and embodiments of queerness in Africa, and from the experience of emigration and settlement by the writers concerned in France.
The book analyses how such writers as Rachid O., Abdellah Taïa, Eyet Chékib Djaziri, Nina Bouraoui, foreground translation and narrative reflexivity around incommensurable spaces of queerness in order to index their crossings and negotiations of multiple languages, histories, cultures. By writing in French, it argues that these writers are not merely mimicking the language of their former coloniser, but inflecting a European language with vocabularies and turns of phrase indigenous to North Africa, thus creating new possibilities of meaning and expression to name their lived experience of gender and sexual otherness—a form of (queer) translational praxis that destabilises received gender/sexual categories both within the Maghreb and in Europe.