EP 6 : Sex, France & Arab men - with Todd SHEPARD - 🇬🇧

Today's episode deals with colonization and its relation to sexuality and masculinity. If we read thoroughly Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell, “hegemonic masculinities” were constructed as white, while subordinate masculinities were reserved for people of color, less close to the ideal and closer to deviance. It’s also important to adopt an intersectional point of view here since we’ll be talking about a history that has been told for decades by the ones who colonized, overshadowing the reality of the ones who were colonized and seeking freedom from the oppressor. Yet, the fear of ideological rape and territorial penetration has grown in French people’s minds since the fifties. Algerian hyper-virility was opposed to a crisis of French masculinity, thought to be the cause of defeat in Algeria. The far right presented itself as the possibility of restoring a virile authority versus the quote “twinks” and “dandies” of May 68 who were deemed as too effeminate to fight against the Arab invasion. Apparently, it would have given the figure of the Algerian pimp – an engine of the Arab invasion in France according to the far-right - and that of the Maghrebi immigrant worker whose hypersexuality and sexual misery would lead to the need to resort to prostitutes and to relentlessly rape white women...Todd Shepard is a Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. In 2008, he wrote The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France and co-wrote "Guerre d’Algérie : le sexe outragé" with Catherine Brun in 2016. In 2017, his book Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979 has become in English-speaking academic environments the new reference on how “sexual Orientalism” re-emerged in post-decolonization French politics. So he’s the best person to go to for a nice discussion French far right politics, May ’68, prostitution, gay rights, sexual libertinism and rape explicitly grappled with questions of imperialism, the Algerian war, colonial violence, and post-decolonization racism.🚀 Season 2 produced by Kikina Studio Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.