inhospitable to and sexual minorities, the banlieue, and attitudes there in regard to gender and sexuality, have more recently been presented as a microcosm of the Muslim world inside France. In to inaugurate this inquiry, virility will first be unmoored from its gender assignment in order to better comprehend it as a concept. In this vein, I pay attention to how "virile" banlieue women have been depicted by some of these same activist actors. Though the latter loudly state their "progressive," feminist credentials, I will argue that the representation of virile women poses particular problems for French LGBT and feminist activists who have elsewhere built up the alleged danger of immigrant-issued virilities for sexual diversity and tolerance. It would seem, upon analysis, that the condemnation of virility overshadows concern for women in general, repressing the diversity of gender expression, by contending that women adopting “virile” postures must necessarily be victims of false consciousness, having integrated, despite themselves, an overpowering and non-transgressive virility that conventionally fits the masculinist laws of the banlieue. Though the latin root of “virility”—“vir”—does denote “man,” my use of the term does not interpret these women’s practices as a mere reappropriation of a trait that fits men more “naturally.” In illustrations throughout this study, virility evolves from a gender essence to denote a concept that combines assertiveness, ambition, potency, and sometimes combativity. Though one kind of reading would find in these practices a projection of gender norms, I argue that these women (and in a different way, banlieue sexual minorities) remove the gender component of “virility” so that it slides toward a gender-neutral concept, one that reflects urban belonging rather than gender belonging. Missed in depictions like La Cité du mâle is a sensitivity to how virility might constitute a manipulable tool allowing women who master it to deal in the currency of the environments in which they reside, often achieving the respect of their peers and demonstrating implantation in the community at hand. Evidence for this is found,
imagine ethnographers ready to pounce on faulty methodology, so inflected are Chaumont’s analyses with an uninterrogated class and cultural slant. Such an investigation would explore, without excusing or justifying what is objectionable in Madjid’s speech, the conditions which lead virilism to be read as juvenile and anti-modern, rather than as an instrument formed by contemporary socio-economic circumstances. The speech of virile sexual minorities has rarely (save for the outer reaches of queer theory) been read as anything other than the reification of a timeless patriarchy. Even more rarely has it been interpreted as the possible response to the gendered humiliation of their immigrant parents’ generation, as these youth might perceive it75. In the gay mainstream press, commentators have often depoliticized virile homosexual identity by calling it juvenile or a compensation technique, but few have interpreted virilism as a highly politicized gender reaction to class and race conformism in the gay community. Such is the lens through which one can begin a critique of Chaumont’s analyses, not to excuse or look charitably on virilist abuses where they do occur, but rather to consider the condemnation of virility in relation to a homonormativity rapidly consolidating around particular class, culture and race determinants. Seen as a prisoner of his banlieue environs, what nevertheless transpires through Madjid and his tales (adjusted for the histrionic exagerration youths are sometimes prone to) is a capacity for urban mobility and cross-class interactions, evident in his later anecdotes about meeting other men in the city center. Chaumont’s one-way focus on Madjid’s contradictions sheds light on how contradiction in Homo-ghetto is criticized when committed by others but elided when committed by the author. The way Chaumont recurrently evokes contradiction in Madjid ironically echoes the debilitating gestures of 19th century Western European medicine, as recounted by Foucault, was in the habit of diagnosing homosexuals as alienated, their “performances” and coping mechanisms laughably 75 See section three of Chapter Two, on the “Impotent Father,” p. 175-176.