ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I focus on a dramatic exchange from the year 2000 on evolving notions of Franco-Arab body image that speaks volumes about the aesthetic depreciation and sudden revalorisation of Arabs and banlieue residents as possible sources of beauty. The printed exchange, now out of print and unavailable online, took place between two prominent French anti-discrimination activists early on in their careers: Malek Boutih, then president of SOS Racisme and a fixture of the Parti Socialiste, and Fouad Zeraoui, a nightlife entrepreneur behind a popular and long-lived gay club night called ‘Black Blanc Beur’ in Paris. The premise and also title of their exchange was ‘Homophobia in the banlieues’: Zeraoui and Boutih discuss how minority self-perception can be reflected in clothing choices and behaviour in nightclubs, a terrain common to both Boutih and Zeraoui.
I argue that activists of a certain stripe, whose mission it is to advocate for sexual and ethnic minorities in France’s multi-ethnic suburbs, tend to stigmatise locals’ efforts to conceive of their own beauty and self-worth, because it would too proudly resemble communitarian pride, the enemy of Republican unity. The exchange that occurred in 2000 illuminates the seeds of the model-minority-tough-on-his-peers-persona that the then activist Boutih would later incarnate as a seasoned politician in 2015, tasked with crafting the nation’s response to Islamic terrorism in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
