The 13th Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award-Winning Essay: The right to feel bad: ambivalence as resistance in Fatima Daas’s <i>La Petite Dernière</i> ( <i>The Last One</i> )

Fatima Daas’s debut novel, La Petite Dernière ( The Last One ), has been both lauded and attacked for its autofictional representation of a Muslim lesbian growing up in Paris’s marginalized suburbs. Analyses of this work have focused on the protagonist Fatima’s multi-faceted identity as a young woman struggling to reconcile her faith and sexuality. This article shifts the focus from identity to affect by putting La Petite Dernière in dialogue with Sara Ahmed’s theorization of emotion’s social functions. The novel’s reception showcases the limited cultural narratives available to queer Muslim subjects: either reject faith and find fulfillment in individual freedom or reconcile it harmoniously with queerness. Daas expands these possibilities through a “poetics of ambivalence” that exposes the complexity and discomfort of Fatima’s feelings without offering tidy resolutions. Fatima discovers that ambivalence, when shared with a partner, is more than a mere cause of social isolation, and can become the basis of a meaningful relationship. Ultimately, literary explorations of bad feelings can provide minoritized authors with a subtle form of resistance to the affective demands of sexual nationalisms.