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.In The Crying Game, which depicts a world driven by anxiety aboutterritorial boundaries and threatened by bodies deemed foreign,transgression occurs along (and across) both national and genderedlines.Okwe says of organ sellers in Dirty Pretty Things that they swappedtheir insides for a passport , and these words could just as easily beused to refer to the corporeal border crossing (or criss-crossing) betweenone gender category and another.If most transgendered people donot surgically reassign their bodies, such reassignment neverthelessfunctions as the potential endpoint for transgendered subjectivity; innarratives of radical change and new possibility, surgery is often theutopian transformative gesture for the transgendered that organ sellingis for the hopelessly subaltern.Although in terms of will and agency thetransgendered individual might seem to fall into a completely differentcategory from organ sellers or transplant recipients, the appeal of rep-resentations of transsexuals or drag queens for straight audiences as acomponent of diasporic and immigrant communities is that they liter-alize the image of the person who seems to be one thing, but is in factsomething else.Becoming a resident of another country, like becominganother gender, begs the question of what can be retained and whatmust be left behind.In the extremes of organ transplant and actualsexual reassignment surgery, what is gained and what is lost when theother is literally incorporated into one s self?Like immigration, alternative sexualities and gender identities representa threat to the integrity in other words, the threat of dismemberment of the body politic, just as the transgendered and homosexual characters 222 Postcolonial Transplantsrepresent a supposed threat to the reproductive economy valorized inmodels of the nation-state.In three high-profile French films of thelast decade that feature Maghrebi characters Wild Side (S�bastienLifshitz, 2004), Chouchou (Merzak Allouache, 2002) and Dr�le de F�lix / TheAdventures of Felix (Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, 2000) the central characters are gay or transgendered.Wild Side focuses on athree-way relationship between a transgendered French sex worker bythe name of St�phanie; a second- or third-generation Maghrebi mannamed Djamel, who is also a sex worker; and a Russian immigrant namedMikhail.Nick Rees-Roberts s observation about Wild Side, which, he sug-gests, attempts to find some common ground between gay assimilationand precarious immigration (Rees-Roberts 2007: 154), could be appliedto all three films.The perceived threat to the nuclear family and byextension to the body politic is acknowledged in these films attemptsto construct alternative family structures.The explicit establishmentof surrogate families in these films (whose culmination is the gay,transgendered wedding ceremony in Chouchou) serves to offset such athreat it is notable that all three films emphasize the construction ofalternative family units based on elective affinities rather than biology.In Wild Side, Mikhail, who speaks almost no French, indicates that hemisses his family in Russia, and Djamel points to himself and St�phaniein order to convey the idea that they are his family.Dr�le de F�lix about a gay man s road trip from Dieppe to Marseille to find his father,whom he has never met is punctuated by on-screen titles assigningfamilial roles to people F�lix befriends along the way ( mon petit fr�re , ma grand-m�re , mon cousin ).The final title, Mon p�re , refers notto F�lix s biological father, whom he ultimately decides not to meet,but to a kindly older man (played by Maurice B�nichou) whom F�lixencounters shortly before arriving in Marseille.Sometimes, as in Stephen Frears s landmark film My BeautifulLaundrette (1985), spurning the traditional nuclear family is equatedwith spurning the traditions of the old country.Frears s film itself issomething of a transplant in that it was originally made for televisionbefore gaining a theatrical release.My Beautiful Laundrette unfoldsprimarily from the perspective of the gay Pakistani Omar, who is tornbetween the desire to love Britain as represented by his relationshipwith his white British schoolmate Johnny and his commitment tomaintaining his standing in his Pakistani family.The fact that some inthe Pakistani family have used their move to Britain to bolster theirstatus as members of the financially stable bourgeoisie is complicatedby the fact that this status is made possible primarily by their ready Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden 223recourse to criminality.The oxymoronic idea of a beautiful laundretteparodies the notion of capitalism as a beautifying agent that one findsin many discourses that promote globalization.However, as an old-school image of capitalist villainy, Omar s cousin Salim does everythingbut twirl his mustachios.In his investment in both his own ethnicityand in unfettered moneymaking, Salim, unlike his father, is a robberwho has no desire to be a baron.Omar s father, on the other hand,prefers the assimilationist path that leads through the fetishized site of university.Finally, the working-class entrepreneurship that Omarembraces is, according to his father, nothing more than cleaning dirtyunderpants.It is the proximity of Omar s enterprise to the life of thebody and not that of the mind that his intellectually accomplishedfather finds most disreputable.The film s ending suggests that theimpossibly complicated dynamics of relating to one s ethnic compeerscan be transcended by the assumption of life as a queer couple.It isnotable that the interracial gay relationship succeeds while the interracialheterosexual one is revealed to be untenable, suggesting that, althoughostensibly threatening to the reproductive values of the nation-state,homosexuality is actually a reassuring alternative that does not in factthreaten the white metropolitan nuclear family in the same way thatthe single male postcolonial subject or the heterosexually reproductiveimmigrant family is represented as doing [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.In The Crying Game, which depicts a world driven by anxiety aboutterritorial boundaries and threatened by bodies deemed foreign,transgression occurs along (and across) both national and genderedlines.Okwe says of organ sellers in Dirty Pretty Things that they swappedtheir insides for a passport , and these words could just as easily beused to refer to the corporeal border crossing (or criss-crossing) betweenone gender category and another.If most transgendered people donot surgically reassign their bodies, such reassignment neverthelessfunctions as the potential endpoint for transgendered subjectivity; innarratives of radical change and new possibility, surgery is often theutopian transformative gesture for the transgendered that organ sellingis for the hopelessly subaltern.Although in terms of will and agency thetransgendered individual might seem to fall into a completely differentcategory from organ sellers or transplant recipients, the appeal of rep-resentations of transsexuals or drag queens for straight audiences as acomponent of diasporic and immigrant communities is that they liter-alize the image of the person who seems to be one thing, but is in factsomething else.Becoming a resident of another country, like becominganother gender, begs the question of what can be retained and whatmust be left behind.In the extremes of organ transplant and actualsexual reassignment surgery, what is gained and what is lost when theother is literally incorporated into one s self?Like immigration, alternative sexualities and gender identities representa threat to the integrity in other words, the threat of dismemberment of the body politic, just as the transgendered and homosexual characters 222 Postcolonial Transplantsrepresent a supposed threat to the reproductive economy valorized inmodels of the nation-state.In three high-profile French films of thelast decade that feature Maghrebi characters Wild Side (S�bastienLifshitz, 2004), Chouchou (Merzak Allouache, 2002) and Dr�le de F�lix / TheAdventures of Felix (Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, 2000) the central characters are gay or transgendered.Wild Side focuses on athree-way relationship between a transgendered French sex worker bythe name of St�phanie; a second- or third-generation Maghrebi mannamed Djamel, who is also a sex worker; and a Russian immigrant namedMikhail.Nick Rees-Roberts s observation about Wild Side, which, he sug-gests, attempts to find some common ground between gay assimilationand precarious immigration (Rees-Roberts 2007: 154), could be appliedto all three films.The perceived threat to the nuclear family and byextension to the body politic is acknowledged in these films attemptsto construct alternative family structures.The explicit establishmentof surrogate families in these films (whose culmination is the gay,transgendered wedding ceremony in Chouchou) serves to offset such athreat it is notable that all three films emphasize the construction ofalternative family units based on elective affinities rather than biology.In Wild Side, Mikhail, who speaks almost no French, indicates that hemisses his family in Russia, and Djamel points to himself and St�phaniein order to convey the idea that they are his family.Dr�le de F�lix about a gay man s road trip from Dieppe to Marseille to find his father,whom he has never met is punctuated by on-screen titles assigningfamilial roles to people F�lix befriends along the way ( mon petit fr�re , ma grand-m�re , mon cousin ).The final title, Mon p�re , refers notto F�lix s biological father, whom he ultimately decides not to meet,but to a kindly older man (played by Maurice B�nichou) whom F�lixencounters shortly before arriving in Marseille.Sometimes, as in Stephen Frears s landmark film My BeautifulLaundrette (1985), spurning the traditional nuclear family is equatedwith spurning the traditions of the old country.Frears s film itself issomething of a transplant in that it was originally made for televisionbefore gaining a theatrical release.My Beautiful Laundrette unfoldsprimarily from the perspective of the gay Pakistani Omar, who is tornbetween the desire to love Britain as represented by his relationshipwith his white British schoolmate Johnny and his commitment tomaintaining his standing in his Pakistani family.The fact that some inthe Pakistani family have used their move to Britain to bolster theirstatus as members of the financially stable bourgeoisie is complicatedby the fact that this status is made possible primarily by their ready Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden 223recourse to criminality.The oxymoronic idea of a beautiful laundretteparodies the notion of capitalism as a beautifying agent that one findsin many discourses that promote globalization.However, as an old-school image of capitalist villainy, Omar s cousin Salim does everythingbut twirl his mustachios.In his investment in both his own ethnicityand in unfettered moneymaking, Salim, unlike his father, is a robberwho has no desire to be a baron.Omar s father, on the other hand,prefers the assimilationist path that leads through the fetishized site of university.Finally, the working-class entrepreneurship that Omarembraces is, according to his father, nothing more than cleaning dirtyunderpants.It is the proximity of Omar s enterprise to the life of thebody and not that of the mind that his intellectually accomplishedfather finds most disreputable.The film s ending suggests that theimpossibly complicated dynamics of relating to one s ethnic compeerscan be transcended by the assumption of life as a queer couple.It isnotable that the interracial gay relationship succeeds while the interracialheterosexual one is revealed to be untenable, suggesting that, althoughostensibly threatening to the reproductive values of the nation-state,homosexuality is actually a reassuring alternative that does not in factthreaten the white metropolitan nuclear family in the same way thatthe single male postcolonial subject or the heterosexually reproductiveimmigrant family is represented as doing [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
