Skin and Silence in Selected Maghrebian Queer Films

The main premise of this article is that Maghreb cinema cannot openly represent queerness. Nadia El Fani's Bedwin Hacker (2003), Raja Amari's Al Dowaha (Buried Secrets) (2009) and Abdellah Taïa's L'Armée du Salut (The Salvation Army) (2013) represent queerness as muted, silent and secret, performed in darkness and shadowy spaces. Drawing on cultural theories of the significance of skin, I argue that in the selected films, skin and silence are expressive screens on and through which queerness is disclosed and from which it can be viewed and also interpreted. As sites of interrogation and expressive screens of queerness, skin creates layered visual narratives that challenge the silencing of queer sexualities in the Maghreb. Skin is a surface from where and through which forms of embodied self-fashioned resistance against racialised, gendered and sexual norms are performed.