Mixed Feelings in France: White Femininity and Métissage in French Multicultural Comedy

While multicultural comedies criticise hegemonic whiteness and outdated stances on race relations, they simultaneously perpetuate the colonial aesthetic register by deploying a republican gaze - an ironic meta-narrative perspective on ethnic minorities. Ewelina Pepiak analyses how gender and ethnicity are represented in seven contemporary French comedies (2008-2018) including mixed-race couples, focusing on a trope of métissage (biological and cultural mixing) and white femininity. As analyses of ethnic and gender representations remain scarce due to the slow emergence of postcolonial studies in France, this study adds significant insights to the postcolonial debate.

Ewelina Pepiak, born in 1980, completed her doctorate at the Romance studies institute at Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen and was a member of International PhD Programme Literary and Cultural Studies. From 2017-2023 she worked as a lecturer in literary, media and gender studies at Justus-Liebig-Universität and at TU Darmstadt. Her research interests focus on French postcolonial studies, especially critical whiteness studies in literary and film analyses.