Treacherous Love Stories

Two events coming about about Sexuality and Islam in France

Undergraduate Lecture by Denis Provencher, University of Arizona entitled Treacherous Love Stories - September 13, 2017, Noon- 12:50 PM, September 13, 144 Cathedral of Learning

General Lecture entitled Queer Maghrebi, September 13, 1:30 PM - 3 PM, 602 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh

Dr. Denis M. Provencher is Professor of French and Department Head in French and Italian at the University of Arizona. He is a scholar of contemporary French and Francophone cultural studies and queer theory and LGBT studies with an emphasis on the global, the transnational, and the intercultural. His scholarship cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries and explores the transnational flow of languages, peoples, and ideas -- related to gender, sexuality, class, race, and religion -- across North America, Europe, and the Global South (North Africa). For example, in his first book, Queer French: Globalization, Language, and Sexual Citizenship in France (Ashgate, 2007), he adopts a queer linguistic approach to examine the role of the “closet” in a republican French context where national identity and universalism forecloses the language of sexual identity, multiculturalism, and diversity. It draws on French literature, popular culture, and ethnographic field research and first-person accounts of “coming out” in France to examine the tensions between Anglo-American and French articulations of same-sex desire. In his new companion volume, Queer Maghrebi French: Language, Temporalities, Transfiliations, (Liverpool UP, forthcoming 2017), he relies on adopts an intersectional approach informed by feminist and queers-of-color scholarship to examine many issues -- globalization, transnationalism, imagined kinship, sexual citizenship, and competing models of gendered modernity -- in France, North Africa, and Canada. Through an analysis of various cultural texts and technologies produced by queer Maghrebi (North African) and Maghrebi-French photographers, performance artists, religious thinkers, novelists, and filmmakers, Queer Maghrebi French investigates a broad range of diasporic utopian spaces and identities that have emerged at the intersection of France, the Maghreb, and North America. Mixing ethnography and literary and cultural studies, it constructs an elaborate nexus of theoretical concerns and analytical frameworks to examine the ways in which artists and writers of Maghrebi descent negotiate the competing claims of secular Republicanism, family, and religious ties.

Event Date: 
Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - 12:00pm to 12:45pm
Institution(s): 
Sponsored By: 
Department of French and Italian and the Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies Program, European Studies Center, Honors College, Humanities Center, University of Pittsburgh
Location: 
144 Cathedral of Learning
Target Audience: 
Higher Education
Presenter Type: 
Visiting Scholar/Faculty