Remembering Bodies: Gender, Race, and Nationality in the French-Algerian War

This dissertation interrogates images and narratives of the body during the FrenchAlgerian
War, an eight-year conflict that began in 1954 and ended with Algerian
independence in 1962. Moving between Algeria and France in my analyses and
considering documents from the period in question and from later years that reflect back
on it, I analyze literary works, films, memoirs, and a legal case in order to consider how
physical violence and trauma produce a variety of forms of psychological and corporeal
dissonance and how the repression of personal and collective memories can impact bodies
and minds both destructively and productively. An investigation of the workings of the
social constructs of gender and sexuality is at the center of this project, and I consistently
take an approach that actively engages feminist theoretical perspectives, while also taking
into account how other categories like race, class, ethnicity, nationality, and citizenship
intersect with gender and sexuality to structure our understanding of embodiment and
memory during the French-Algerian War. Given the unique and gendered ways in which
bodies respond to violence and consequently hold memories, the French-Algerian War
proves to be a compelling case study regarding the transformative and agential power of
bodies during periods of resistance.
Drawing on disciplines such as cultural studies, feminist sociology, postcolonial studies,
social movement theory, and human rights studies, I situate my dissertation at the
intersection of theories of embodiment and of memory to investigate the myriad ways in
which this war of decolonization was literally and figuratively fought on the bodies of
Algerian women. Conversely, through the attention it caused to be paid to the Muslim
female body, the war placed the seemingly “neutral” and “unmarked” body of the French,
heterosexual, Christian, white, male body in question. In analyses of my primary archive, I
also uncover how the process of decolonization sparked a crisis in national identity, as
“Frenchness” (what it meant to be French) was constructed, deconstructed, and
reconstructed with every turn of the war, particularly as revelations of torture and brutality
emerged. Additionally, I propose that this moment posed a crisis in gender and sexuality,
as it became a period of reification of certain forms of masculinity and femininity and a
contestation and production of others. Finally, I turn to recent works and current events
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in order to uncover some of the ways in which the French-Algerian War goes on having
an impact today.