Mehdi Ben Attia’s Family Ties, Temporalities, and Revolutionary Figures

In this chapter, I conduct an analysis of language, temporalities, and transfiliations in the life and cinematic work of Mehdi Ben Attia, the first Tunisian screenwriter and director to depict a self-identified gay male Tunisian protagonist alongside a variety of other “queer” and “non-queer” characters in his oeuvre. In part one, I examine excerpts from my 2010 one-on-one interview with Ben Attia in order to illustrate how his speech acts emphasize the importance of filiation, and in particular, being the eldest male child within the Maghrebi (French) family. His interview also exemplifies a flexible accumulation of language that queer Maghrebi French speakers use throughout this book as they “straddle” competing discourses and temporalities, and this emerges in full force in our conversation, and especially in reference to his discussion with his middle-class mother about his sexuality through his cinematic work.