Transforming Family: Queer Kinship and Migration Contemporary Francophone Literature

One of the lasting legacies of colonialism is the assumption that families should conform to a kinship arrangement built on normative, nuclear, individuality-based models. An alternate understanding of familial aspiration is one cultivated across national borders and cultures and beyond the constraints of diasporas. This alternate understanding, which imagines a category of “trans-” families, relies on decolonial and queer intellectual thought to mobilize or transform power across borders. In Jocelyn Frelier examines a selection of novels penned by francophone authors in France, Morocco, and Algeria, including Azouz Begag, Nina Bouraoui, Fouad Laroui, Leïla Sebbar, Leïla Slimani, and Abdellah Taïa. Each novel contributes a unique argument about this alternate understanding of family, questioning how family relates to race, gender, class, embodiment, and intersectionality. Arguing that trans- families are queer, Frelier opens up new spaces of agency for both family units and individuals who seek representation and fulfilling futures. The novels analyzed in , as well as the families they depict, resist classification and delink the legacies of colonialism from contemporary modes of being. As a result, these novels create trans- identities for their protagonists and contribute to a scholarly understanding of the becoming trans- of cultural production. As international political debates related to migration, the family unit, and the “global migrant crisis” surge, Frelier destabilizes governmental criteria for the “regrouping” of families by turning to a set of definitions found in the cultural production of members of the francophone, North African diaspora.