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This article considers how recent French documentary filmmaking has engaged with the representation of masculinities in some of Paris's most emblematic banlieues. Focusing on Alice Diop's sixth film Vers la tendresse (2016), which brings to the screen testimonies of straight and gay men from La Courneuve, Aulnay-sous-Bois, and Montreuil, this article examines how the documentary form offers new ways to interrogate men's experiences of love and relationships in the French peripheries. Drawing on an interview with the filmmaker, this article argues that Diop's conversation-based performative documentary filmmaking, with its detaching of image from sound, destabilizes viewer assumptions and challenges cultural cliches about men and emotion. By emphasizing the universal characteristics of the men's personal accounts, this article suggests that Diop's film reclaims the banlieues from the stereotype of a marginal space of 'otherness' and offers instead singular narratives, voicing poignant portraits of masculinities that resonate widely in twenty-first century France. Keywords: banlieues, Diop, French documentary filmmaking, masculinities, sexualities, Alice Diop and Urban France Alice Diop has emerged as a significant and important voice in contemporary French documentary filmmaking. With eight documentary films to her name at the time [...]

This article considers how French theatre has contributed to debates on the condition of women living in the banlieues in a post-2015 context of terrorist attacks and a nationwide state of emergency. Focusing on the play F(l)ammes (2017) by Ahmed Madani, which interrogates women's lived experiences, this article examines how theatre, drawing upon psychotherapeutic practices, engages with the complex interweaving of race, class and gender in marginalised French urban spaces. Using Nacira Guénif-Souilamas's analysis of women from the banlieues and Stuart Hall's work on the negotiation of multiple identities, this article suggests that F(l)ammes and the acting workshops from which it emerged eschew mass media representations of the French banlieues as violent, dangerous territories and offer an unusual, women-centred counter-discourse on the French nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role played in France by the culture du quotidien (everyday culture) in establishing a more integrated image of the nation and identity. It suggests that since the 1960s, dominant media discourse in France, and artistic representations of the urban periphery, have often perpetuated an image of the cites as menacing spaces detached from the national community and emblematic of France's postmodern crisis. Focusing on everyday cultural creations about the Grand Ensemble in La Courneuve, it argues that the 'ordinariness' of the lives these creations convey, along with the residents' cultural practices and their continuing sense of belonging, effectively treats geography, culture and history in a way that questions the standard externalising discourse about the cites. Despite their limits in terms of circulation, these cultural artefacts of a 'third kind' offer images that contribute to challenging the 'banlieues myth' and help re-construct a French identity perceived under threat. 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]