Vinay Swamy

Select Publications

1. Devenir non-binaire en français contemporain. Eds. Vinay Swamy and Louisa Mackenzie. (Éditions Le Manuscrit, 2022).

In recent years, the visibility of non-binary individuals who publicly claim their identity beyond the binary gender has greatly increased both in in English and French. While the singular “they” has won favor with many people in English-speaking spaces, non-binary French-speaking people have faced other challenges regarding the language and syntax, given the binary nature of French grammar itself. This collective volume, entirely in French, examines recent attempts to make equitable, inclusive, and expansive language and identities available to everyone within Francophone linguistic, cultural, and educational spaces. As a result, Devenir non-binaire en français contemporain challenges the received idea of non-conforming gender as a simple import from across the Atlantic, of an American-based identity model.

Review by Éléonore de Beaumont, fabula.org, Octobre 2022 (Volume 23, numéro 8)

Review by Chantal Crozet, Journal of French Language Studies (2022), 1–3

2. Legitimizing 'iel'? Language and Trans Communities in Francophone and Anglophone Spaces. Eds. Vinay Swamy and Louisa Mackenzie. H-France Salon, Volume 11, Issue 14, 2019.

The last few years have seen an increased visibility of non-binary persons who are publicly claiming their identities and pronouns beyond the gender binary in both English and French. While the singular “they” has gained favor among many in Anglophone spaces due in part to the precedent for such a usage in English, Francophone non-binary persons have had to face further challenges regarding language and syntax given the binary nature of French grammar itself. This special issue considers recent attempts to make available gender-equitable, -neutral, and -expansive language and identities to French speakers within linguistic, cultural, and pedagogical spaces. In offering to the readers of H-France our reflections on these developments, the contributors to this special issue expand on the fruitful exchange initiated at a symposium at Vassar College in April 2018—when earlier versions of this material were first presented—and invite dialogue with a broader public. In so doing, we hope that the questions we raise will be taken in the spirit of ongoing inquiry rather than as prescriptive positions (as indicated by the titular question mark), and that our chapters will be read as open-ended engagements with the rapidly-developing public conversations on non-binary issues beyond the academy. The embedded hyperlinks and the appended glossary will allow our readers to engage directly, if they so wish, with the many multimedial resources cited in this issue.

3. Marcela Iacub, Through the Keyhole: A history of Sex, Space and Public Modesty in Modern France. Translated by Vinay Swamy (Manchester University Press, 2016).

In 1857, a group of young people who had participated in an orgy in a private mansion was sentenced for contempt of public decency (outrage public à la pudeur) because a voyeur was able to watch them through a keyhole. For Marcela Iacub, the crux of such cases hinges on where the public ends and the private begins, and what one can reveal, and what one ought to hide.

Today, the term pudeur has disappeared from the French penal code to be replaced by Sex. But, far from being an epic story of hard-won freedom, Iacub demonstrates that the transformation techniques used by the State in the last two centuries have rendered sexuality into a spectacle and have conditioned our spaces, our clothes, our comportment and even some of our mental illnesses. In so doing, Iacub offers us a politico-legal history of the gaze.

4. Les Écrans de l'intégration : L'immigration maghrébine dans le cinéma français.
Eds. Sylvie Durmelat and Vinay Swamy (Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2015).

North African immigrants, once confined to France’s social and cultural margins, have become a strong presence in France’s national life. Similarly, descendants of immigrants from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia have gained mainstream recognition as filmmakers and as the subject of films. The first collective volume on this topic, Les Écrans de l'intégration—an updated French translation of Screening Integration—offers a sustained critical analysis of this cinema. In particular, contributors evaluate how Maghrebi films have come to participate in, promote, and, at the same time, critique France’s integration. In the process, these essays reflect on the conditions that allowed for the burgeoning of this cinema in the first place, as well as on the social changes the films delineate.

Les Écrans de l'intégration / Screening Integration bring together established scholars in the fields of postcolonial, Francophone, and film studies to address the latest developments in this cinematic production. These authors explore the emergence of various genres that recast the sometimes fossilized idea of ethnic difference. Les Écrans de l'intégration / Screening Integration provide a much-needed reference—both in French and English—to all those interested in comprehending the complex shifts in twenty-first-century French cinema and in the multicultural social formations that have become an integral part of contemporary France in the new millennium..

5. Screening Integration: Recasting Maghrebi Immigration in Contemporary France.
Eds. Sylvie Durmelat and Vinay Swamy (Univiversity of Nebraska Press, 2011).

6. Interpreting the Republic: Marginalization and Belonging in Contemporary French Novels and Films (Lexington Books, 2011).

Interpreting the Republic focuses on contemporary French literary and cinematic works (1986-2003) that reflect on what it means to belong to a nation such as France by giving voice to those who find themselves marginalized by French society. While citizenship and belonging can be, and indeed are, interpreted differently depending on the socio-cultural and political context, it is the foundational universalist republican principle of egalitarianism that has remained the sacred cow of French society. One of the major claims of this study is that the rigidity of French national discourse that attempts to impose a certain homogeneity in its official identificatory practices—all citizens are French, and thus difference (ethnic, sexual or other) ceases to matter—is but one of the many possible interpretations of the notion of the Republic. Vinay Swamy seeks to show how such supposedly unshakeable principles, too, can be, and often are, reinterpreted in novel ways by the works analyzed in this study, which carve out niches for their protagonists that are otherwise foreclosed in the French national space.

Swamy examines the different tactics of identification deployed in works ranging from early "romans beurs" by Azouz Begag, Farida Belghoul and Soraya Nini, and Allah Superstar, the 2003 satirical novel by Y.B., to a number of films including Gazon maudit (1995), Ma vie en rose (1997), Le Placard (2001), Chouchou (2003), all of which (re)interpret the Republic in an effort to legitimize their protagonists' otherwise marginalized social position(s). He demonstrates how all these works put pressure, in a variety of ways, on an unacknowledged understanding of the institutional positions.

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