Conclusion: Frenchness as a New Transcultural Identification

Abstract

Navarro-Ayala concludes that Frenchness is often perceived as queer when it exits the Hexagon. Frenchness, whether imagined or real, is treated as queer and transcultural in the Latin American and North African contexts. Navarro-Ayala contends that possible sites of resistance—which initially appear to be signs of the inappropriate, because of the individual’s mimetic component through self bodily manipulations (or the strategic confusing character, as Homi Bhabha would claim)—provide an unexpected agency to the boys involved in homosexual tourism in Morocco. The intimate interaction with the French Other allows writers to not only erase former colonial traces, but also propose postcolonial subversion and new transcultural identifications, where the queer subject from the global South becomes an active participant in the process.