Circulations, Accumulations, and Superdiversity

Abstract

In his discussion of queer Maghrebi French, Provencher focuses attention on the "flexible language" of sexuality (2017: 27-32) associated with same-sex desiring speakers of Maghrebi French. As Provencher shows, the connections between language and sexuality in these settings are best described as an accumulation of linguistic details drawn from Maghrebi Berber and Arabic, continental French, along with British and American English. That work of accumulation, or "confluence of scripts" as Provencher also terms it (2018: 30), provides Maghrebi French speakers with various ways to express their "sexual selfhood, freedom, belonging and resilience" and to engage their "continued marginalization and exclusion" from family, French society, and French gay community (Provencher 2017: 30). 1 The examples reviewed in Chapter 4 have suggested that language use before Stonewall can also be described as a confluence of scripts, and that the language learning was shaped by a process of flexible accumulation. But the confluence of scripts in these examples was not always a product of inter-language accumulation in those cases, however.