Abstract
This paper explores how francophone African fiction represents homosexual and transgender children within contexts where both childhood and sexual diversity are socially and politically fraught. While some texts adopt elements of the Bildungsroman, they frequently sabotage its minimal condition of social integration, emphasizing instead the structural impossibility of reconciling autonomy with conformity. More broadly, queer children are cast through two dominant paradigms: vice, which interprets their sexual and gender variance as moral corruption, and pathology, which frames it as illness. Yet these paradigms are not simply reproduced; they are staged to the point of self-indictment. Finally, I argue that Maghrebi autobiographical novels, taken here as case studies, grant retrospective agency to once-silenced children, normalizing their experiences and reframing them as vehicles of cultural memory.
This article was published open access under a CC BY licence:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
.