Masculine dimensions: Migration and gender in francophone literature and culture

Since the arrival on the literary scene of a number of celebrated women writers during the last thirty years gender has occupied a prominent position in Francophone Studies. Drawing upon this significant body of scholarship, this dissertation aims to show that new representations of gender and sexuality in African literature have not been limited to reinventions of femininity by women writers. I make this argument specifically through a study of the reformulations of gendered identity provoked by migratory movement and the unique migrant trajectories instigated by gender trouble. African masculinity in particular occupies a complex and dynamic position in relation to migration. While Western legislative action requires that African men conform legally to new found cultural norms, social rhetoric constructs the African migrant as a mutable, marginalized figure in Western society. I seek to understand how francophone African literature written during the last twenty years has responded to and re-imagined this binary of migration and masculinity, and to explore the implications such literary strategies have for writing, literature, migration, and identity. Setting forth a corpus composed of novels and autobiographical texts, I argue that in contrast to African writers of the 1950s and 1960s who propose a revalorization of African masculine authority and identity in the face of transnational displacement and disruption, contemporary authors embrace and intensify the problematization of masculinity that occurs through migration. In these texts the masculine body is hyper-eroticized, immigrants perform male drag, homosexuality threatens heterosexuality, and father figures become seducers. Individual chapters propose readings either of a single work or of related texts in light of specific aspects of African migrant experience – the sexual objectification of the African man; social activism and community building; the return of the emigrant; civil war and refugee flows – and their attendant issues of masculine corporeality, identity, and authority. In discussions informed by postcolonial theory, gender studies, histories of migrations, and concepts of transnationalism, I suggest that this recent literary tendency, by favoring complex, diverse portrayals of migrant masculinity over homogenous, consistent representations, offers startling new insights into Francophone identity, gendered relations, the French Republic, and transnational culture