Romance and the Male Secular Body: The Case of Algerian Men in France and Québec

Abstract

AbstractThis article argues that state and cultural expectations for romance at the time of civil marriage in contemporary France and Québec serve as proxies for liberal sexual values laden in the “secular body.” To date, secularism studies scholars have primarily conceptualized gender in relation to how political-legal regimes aim to render religious and racialized women’s bodies “secular.” The omission of cis-gender men in this corpus parallels many states’ foci on women’s conspicuous religious signs and their sexual emancipation. I read the performative expectations for romance in civil marriage within state logics and consumer culture as revelatory of liberal values of free choice, sexual intimacy, and the legibility of secular bodies, which reverberate differently for men. Drawing on ethnographic data among cis-gender heterosexual and racialized men of Algerian origin in France and Québec, I argue that my interlocutors’ experiences reveal prescriptive and exclusionary gendered sexual-secular sensibilities that belie their emancipatory promises.