Queer shame: affect, resistance, and colonial critique in Abdellah Taïa’s Celui qui est digne d’être aimé

Abstract

ABSTRACT One of the first North African Francophone authors to announce and fully assume his minoritised sexuality, Abdellah Taïa has often examined questions of shame with regard to sexuality in his writing. This article seeks to better understand the affective potential of this shame, as well as its relation to emotion and the body, in Taïa’s 2017 Celui qui est digne d’être aimé [He Who is Worthy of Being Loved]. Recent cultural and theoretical work on shame elucidates the paper’s analysis of the materiality, constitution, expression, and circulation of queer shame throughout the novel. Shame, it is argued, becomes a constitutive element in countering Maghrebian and European systems of normalisation, namely heteronormativity and homonormativity. The protagonist’s refusal and eventual deployment of shame, especially against his former homonormative and Orientalist European lovers, and his ostensibly homophobic mother, engender a critique of the extant asymmetrical relationships in his life, as well as the normalising regimes of both France and Morocco. Ultimately, this paper interrogates the inextricable link between affect, the body, and (neo)colonial French occupation found in the novel, making it arguably Taïa’s most political work to date.