Queering the Orientalist porn package: Arab men in French gay pornography

This article charts the shift in focus from orientalist to postcolonial porn production in the French context. We set contemporary digital video production by local studio Citbeur against old-school racial fetish porn made famous by Jean-Daniel Cadinot (Harem, 1984) and later by Jean-Nol Ren Clair in the Studio Beurs series. Unlike the blatant sexual tourism of the colonialist porn produced by Cadinot and JNRC, we argue here that Citbeur marks a break with the exploitative gaze of white pornographers intent on hunting out niche markets for the expanding sector of ethnic pornography. In short, there is a radical shift in focus from the neo-colonial sex and class tourism in Cadinot and JNRC to the multi-ethnic independent production of studio Citbeur, in which the gay beur subculture attempts to mark both a visual distance from stereotypical imagery of Arab masculinity as savage and a political distance from institutional gay culture.