From the torture chamber to the bedchamber: French soldiers, antiwar activists, and the discourse of sexual deviancy in the Algerian War (1954-1962)

Kuby, Emma

doi:https://doi.org/10.3828/cfc.2013.7

Kuby, Emma

Contemporary French Civilization (2013), 38, (2), 131–153.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/cfc.2013.7
Language: English
Pages: 23

Abstract

This article examines French antiwar activists' use of the language of sexual deviancy to condemn the practice of torture by France's military during the Algerian War (1954-1962). Many metropolitan opponents of the conflict charged that Frenchmen who participated in the "intimate" atrocities of the torture chamber were taking perverse pleasure in their brutal work, then returning home to France suffering from a "sexual disorder" or a "militarized sexuality" that rendered them unfit for heteronormative family life. The article traces the distinct forms that the rhetoric of soldierly sexual deviance took in the political writings of various metropolitan activists, including left-wing Catholics, the editorial team of the popular weekly L'Express, and radicalized veteran paratroopers. It also attempts to account for the prevalence of such rhetoric across otherwise very different texts. The charge that torturers would bring diseased, sadistic sexuality "home" to their families functioned as a way of expressing growing anxiety that the violence of the Algerian War was leaking into the French domestic sphere - that is, contaminating the metropolitan body politic. This strategically powerful but ideologically problematic idiom relied on a logic of displacement: it quietly shifted readers' attention away from the suffering of Algerian victims to portray French torturers themselves, their wives, and their families as the ultimate casualties of the torture regime. For French audiences reluctant to be moved to outrage by abuses committed against so-called Muslim "terrorists," activists offered tropes of sadistic bodily intimacy, disrupted family attachments, and perverted domesticity as a means to highlight the damage done to France itself in allowing torture to continue. A final section of the article builds on Frantz Fanon's remarkable contemporary critique of this discourse to consider some of its lasting ethical and political implications.

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