Queers and class

 

In his beautifully written and often intensely moving memoir, Returning to Reims, French intellectual and author Didier Eribon offers his own genealogical accounting of growing up gay in provincial France. As with me and my family, a recent death (his father’s) prompts Eribon to return to his childhood home to visit with his mother and explore what he gained and lost in leaving Reims to lead an openly gay life in Paris.

 

At one point, Eribon reflects on a moment during his visit when his mother, much like my relatives, spread out old photographs for perusal:

 

The private sphere in even its most intimate manifestations, when it resurfaces in old snapshots, can still serve to reinscribe us in the very particular social location from which we came, in places marked by class, in a topography in which that which you might take as belonging to the most fundamentally personal kinds of relations nonetheless plants you firmly in a collective history, a collective geography. (24)

 

The snapshots occasion an opportunity for Eribon to consider how far he has traveled away from Reims as well as how much of his upbringing in the working class still remains with him, shaping his attitudes and habits. In other words, they prompt him to trace his own genealogical relationships.