Staging masculinity for the lens

While the fraught history of civil unrest in France’s disadvantaged suburbs casts them as sites of inherent violence and crime, recent cultural texts featuring the banlieues propose alternative discourses that contest clichés of disorder and delinquency. This article presents and analyzes visual performances of masculinity in Algerian-born photographer Mohamed Bourouissa’s series of photographic tableaux entitled Périphérique (2005–2009). I argue that the staged images reconfigure visual signifiers from media discourse on the banlieues to “decline” (Rosello 1998) stereotypes about les jeunes de banlieues. Presenting internal contradictions to binary gender categories, the photographs destabilize the idea of an innate, aggressive masculinity that drives social violence in the banlieues. Rather, they present heteronormative masculinity as a succession of performances that require peer adjudication to preserve the illusion of pre-discursivity. Périphérique thus reframes masculine performativity in the banlieues as central to an evolving understanding of gender identities in an increasingly multicultural French society

Art · Lens (geology) · Optics · Photography · Physics · Visual arts · French Historical and Cultural Studies · North African History and Literature · Political and Social Issues

• Making Visible

  Olga Smith•Photographies•2018

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