Maxime Cervulle - POSTCOLONIAL PORNOGRAPHY: "BEURS" BOYS IN THE HOOD AND ON CAMERA

20.10., 20:00, Kant-Kino 5, Eintritt 6 Euro, Language of Lecture: English

Biography

Maxime Cervulle is currently working on a PhD about white identity and cinematic representation at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and teaches media and cultural studies at the University of Lille 3 Charles de Gaulle. He has written several articles on pornography, identity politics and queer theory, and has translated into French works from Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Teresa de Lauretis.

Recent Published Works

" De l'articulation entre classe, race, genre et sexualité dans la pornographie "ethnique" " in Bernard Darras (ed.), Études Culturelles, MEI n°24, 2007, soon to be published.

Translation of Eve KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, Epistémologie du placard, Paris, Éditions Amsterdam, 2007, soon to be published.

Translation of Judith BUTLER, Défaire le genre, Paris, Éditions Amsterdam, 2006.

Recent Presentations

" Le sexe de la "racaille" : pornographie ethnique et volonté de sa/voir ", colloque international Hypervisibility/Hypervisibilité : représentations de l'homosexualité dans le cinéma francophone contemporain, École de Cinéma Mel Hoppenheim, Université Concordia, Montréal, 8 juin 2006.

" Pornographie ethnique, minorités visibles et politiques de la représentation ", Journée d'étude " Races, genres et queer ", EFIGIES, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, 7 juin 2006.

Co-organization of the seminar " How to do things with Judith Butler " with Laure Bereni, Marie-Hélène Bourcier, Marco Dell'Omodarme, Irène Jami, Cynthia Kraus, Eléonore Lepinard, Pascale Molinier and Jérôme Vidal. Opening session " Agir sous la contrainte : langages du politique et registres de l'action ", Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, 1st and 2nd of june 2005.

POSTCOLONIAL PORNOGRAPHY: "BEURS" BOYS IN THE HOOD AND ON CAMERA

Visibility, both a central concern of Western gay identity politics and of pornography (remember the famous phrase borrowed to Jean-Louis Comolli by Linda Williams, defining pornography as a "frenzy of the visible") works along asymmetrical lines through the array of race, ethnicity, class, gender or sexuality. As some racial minorities - mainly "beurs" men - become increasingly represented in French gay culture and especially in pornography, we might ask: how does this visibility operate and what drama of power (of representing) and pleasure (of viewing) is being enacted within such representations?

The French porn film studio Citébeur and its website ("the gay Arab and rascal website" ) rapidly became, within the last 5 years, the no. 1 top seller in gay pornography across Europe. What became known as "ethnic gay porn", and which is widely popularized today in France by the films of such diverse companies as Citébeur, Jean-Noël René-Clair, Dargos or Studio Replay, both refers to and rewrites the more explicitly colonial fantasies of earlier "classic" porn films such as Jean-Daniel Cadinot's Harem (1984). If at first sight gay porno-tropes seem to have shifted from Harem' sexual tourism to Citébeur's eroticism of the poor peripheral housing estates, the ghostly presence of what can only be referred to as a 'pornographic orientalism' remains. These films still tend to produce the erotic out of the exotic. They may be positing the erotic Other as geographically distant or close and culturally distant or close, but it appears that anyhow they heavily rely on 1) cultural appropriation; 2) bodily stereotyping of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender; and 3) an invisible white gaze structuring the diegesis.

We will discuss, in this presentation, the politics of the representation of contemporary French "ethnic gay porn" in respect to the articulation of identity, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender each film performs. Comparing between Citébeur's Wesh Cousin saga, René-Clair' Studio Beurs, and Cadinot's Nomades trilogy, we will be able to set apart the films that might empower French gay "beurs" men from those that subject them to an objectifying (post)colonial white gaze.

Registration please at org@pornfilmfestivalberlin.de