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Don and Van Lier focus on Evans and Osada’s criterion of semantic compositionality: What is the interpretation of formally identical lexemes in different syntactic contexts, and what implications does this have for categorial distinctions in individual languages? Data of three candidates for ‘flexible languages’—Kharia (Munda, India), Tagalog (Malayo-Polynesian, Philippines), and Samoan (Oceanic, Samoa)—are compared with Dutch, a ‘differentiated language’ with distinct lexical classes of verbs and nouns. Compositional and non-compositional semantic shifts are found in all four languages. The difference between ‘flexible’ and ‘differentiated’ languages resides in the fact that lexical and syntactic categorization are part of a single operation in languages of the latter type, whereas they are distinct operations in a flexible language. Specifically, while roots in differentiated languages combine with a categorial label before they are further processed by the morphology and syntax, flexible languages can (zero-)derive and combine roots without affecting their distributional freedom.

The introduction situates this project within the broader scholarship in French and Francophone Studies, post-colonial, diaspora and migration studies, gender and women’s studies, LGBT studies and queer theory, and language and sexuality. I divide the Introduction into three parts wherein each one addresses a different driving thread -- language, temporalities and filiations -- of the overarching argument of the book.

In this chapter, I provide a synthesis of the different categories of queer Maghrebi and Maghrebi French subjects we have seen throughout the chapters -- those who are French born or émigrés, those who are working class or middle class, and those who are authors and artists or in other “non-creative” life endeavors. I highlight the multiple paths to queer Maghrebi and Maghrebi French diasporic subjecthood and stress that even those who have access to utopian spaces and transfilial scripts call upon them differently. Indeed, no single diasporic subject exists and each one’s path is unique. Moreover, while the individual’s education level or social class can affect orality, literacy, imagination, and even coherence in one’s story telling, this does not automatically predict how authors, artists and everyday speakers shape their stories with all or any of these. Indeed both the stories of creative and successful strategies and of failure illustrate that the contradictions in the French system limit mobility and integration. Finally, I draw on Raissiguier’s work on France’s sans-papières (undocumented women) and Fernando’s work on veiled French Muslim women working for human rights organizations, to conclude the book with a brief discussion of the status on the languages of racism, patriarchy, and homophobia in France and a call for new models of language on human rights in France and the European Union.

In this chapter, I present and analyze photographer and performance artist “2Fik” (pronounced “Toufik”), one of the Maghrebi French interlocutors from my fieldwork.I situate 2Fik as the first case study because his personal story and creative work provide a very poignant example of the convergence of all three driving threads of the book – language, temporalities, filiations – and the emergence of a transfilial model that draws significantly on his mastery of electronic technologies.

In this chapter, I present the life and work of Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, who is the founder of three non-profit associations over the past several years: Les Enfants du Sida (2006), Homosexuels musulmans de France (HM2F) (2010), and Musulman-es Progressistes de France (2012). He is also the author of Révoltes extraordinaires: un enfant du sida autour du monde (2011) and Le Coran et La Chair (2012), and co-author of Queer Muslim Marriage (2013). During the last few years, the French media have covered his same-sex marriage in Cape Town to husband Qiyaam Jantjies-Zahed in 2011, the publication of his book, Le Coran et La Chair in 2012, as well as and his creation of La Mosquée inclusive de l’Unicité, the first “gay friendly” or inclusive mosque in Paris, in 2012.

In this chapter, I conduct an analysis of language, temporalities, transfiliations, and baraka (meaning “luck,” “chance,” “blessings” or what I’ll call “knowledge”) in the life and work of Abdellah Taïa, one of the first Moroccan authors to write publicly about his own homosexuality and to depict homosexual Moroccan protagonists alongside a variety of other queer and non-queer characters in his autofiction.

I complete this study in this final chapter by turning to conversations with working-class and middle-class men I first met online through social media and chat sites during my six years of fieldwork. Subsequently, I conducted over 50 hour-long, semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with these self-identified homosexual men of Maghrebi and Maghrebi French origin. I draw on conversation and critical discourse analysis in this chapter to show how their stories of challenge and resilience often resonate with those analyzed in the previous chapters.

In this chapter, I conduct an analysis of language, temporalities, and transfiliations in the life and cinematic work of Mehdi Ben Attia, the first Tunisian screenwriter and director to depict a self-identified gay male Tunisian protagonist alongside a variety of other “queer” and “non-queer” characters in his oeuvre. In part one, I examine excerpts from my 2010 one-on-one interview with Ben Attia in order to illustrate how his speech acts emphasize the importance of filiation, and in particular, being the eldest male child within the Maghrebi (French) family. His interview also exemplifies a flexible accumulation of language that queer Maghrebi French speakers use throughout this book as they “straddle” competing discourses and temporalities, and this emerges in full force in our conversation, and especially in reference to his discussion with his middle-class mother about his sexuality through his cinematic work.