“Revolving Closets, Open Undergrounds”

Mehammed Mack
“Revolving Closets, Open Undergrounds: Clandestine Homosexualities in the French banlieues”
[Response: S.E. Eisterer]
Tuesday, April 04, 2023 @5pm ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

When writing the recent history of gay liberation in the “Western” world, we have tended to hold interiors in inferior esteem, as compared with exteriors. Gay self-expression that occurred privately in clandestine clubs, bars, and undergrounds — no matter how emphatic and celebratory — was always going to be mere pre-history, compared to the telos of “coming out” and public acceptance.
In this presentation, I aim to alter this historical script by weaving in the voices of queers of color and immigrants in France: I identify clandestinity and interiors as productive sites for the emergence of queer ethnic minority subcultures.

Mehammed Amadeus Mack is an associate professor of French Studies and the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. He is the author of Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture (Fordham University Press, 2017) and the forthcoming Eurabia: Reverse Crusades and Counter-colonization in European Culture.

S.E. Eisterer is Assistant Professor for Architectural History and Theory at the School of Architecture at Princeton University and a Senior Fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Image: Still from the music video “Virile” by the Blaze.