Faculty Spotlight – Blase Provitola
Feminist, Lesbian, and Queer Postcolonial Studies in the Francophone World
As a faculty member with a joint appointment between Language and Culture Studies and the Program in Women, Gender and Sexuality, I draw on francophone literature and activism to question assumptions that result from the anglophone focus of much queer and feminist studies scholarship. At the same time, I also look to francophone voices outside of the typical canon of French literature and culture, such as racialized and/or queer women and other gender minorities.
My current book project draws on a diverse corpus of cultural production authored by and representing women in France’s North African diasporas to complicate well-known French theories of sexuality (such as Monique Wittig’s critique of heterosexuality and Michel Foucault’s repressive hypothesis). One aim of this project is to assert the relevance of political lesbianism as a theoretical framework in transnational sexuality studies. During my 2024–25 sabbatical, I was able to write and workshop materials related to this book as a research associate with the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, housed at Hampshire College. In March 2025, I was also invited to discuss that research as part of the event “Transnational Circuits of Intimacy” at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College.
More recently, in December 2025, a conference presentation related to my book was expanded and published in the journal Contemporary French Civilization as the 13th Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award-Winning Essay, with the title “The right to feel bad: ambivalence as resistance in Fatima Daas’s La Petite Dernière (The Last One).” This article uses affect theory to analyze Daas’s The Last One, the first novel published by an openly lesbian Franco-Algerian Muslim author. I read Daas’s representation of ambivalence as a form of resistance to the pressure––faced by many queer racialized authors––to publish liberatory narratives with tidy resolutions. I am grateful to students in my course WMGS/LACS 221: Afro-European Feminisms over the past few years, who helped shape my thinking on the novel.
Alongside that work, I have also contributed to an emergent body of francophone transgender studies scholarship. I contributed a chapter to the volume Queer Realms of Memory (Liverpool University Press, 2025), in which I draw on an extensive personal interview with activist Giovanna Rincon to foreground transgender migrants’ place in the French (queer) national narrative. In September 2025, I had the pleasure of presenting that volume, along with some other contributors, at a conference celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the journal Contemporary French Civilization in Raleigh, NC. I am excited to continue bringing this body of research to bear on my 2026–27 classes, such as FREN 355: Intersectional French Feminisms and WMGS/LACS 324: Transgender Migrations.
