Algerian Women in Conflict: Representations of Gender, “Terrorism,” and Islam on the Verge of the War on Terror

FAIN: FT-286209-22

Elizabeth Marie Perego
Appalachian State University (Boone, NC 28608-0001)

Research and writing leading to a book on the depiction of Algerian women as victims in Western and French media during the civil war in the1990s-2000s.

Algerian Women in Conflict examines how local and global artists, activists, and journalists depicted Algeria’s civil conflict (1991-2005), a political struggle between the state and insurgents, as a “war against women.” It argues that depictions of women’s suffering in the war at the hands of “Islamist extremists” helped to prime global audiences for envisioning women as the ultimate victims of Islamic militantism just as U.S. politicians employed such narratives to justify the War on Terror. Yet, these stories obscured the Algerian conflict’s greater complexities. Comparing Algerian women’s experiences to gendered narratives of the 1990s war from the three countries that followed the conflict closely (Algeria, France, and the U.S.) and drawing on queer and feminist theories of conflict, this project explores the centrality of gender to Neo-Orientalist visions of the Muslim world as expressed through art, literature, and journalism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Associated Products

"Algerian Women’s International Activism, 1962-1980: Global South Socialist Feminism, Decolonization, and Unraveling the Myth of Post-Revolution Disengagement.” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "Algerian Women’s International Activism, 1962-1980: Global South Socialist Feminism, Decolonization, and Unraveling the Myth of Post-Revolution Disengagement.”
Author: Elizabeth M. Perego
Abstract: Amid the Algerian Revolution for nationalist independence, Algerian women became daring global symbols of anticolonial resistance. Women supported the cause of national independence in a myriad of ways. As the war wound down and the country faced numerous challenges due to colonial-era underdevelopment, Algerian women remained active as they always had been in public life (Vince 2015; Rahnama 2023). However, emphasis on women’s engagement during the decolonization struggle has obscured this postcolonial activism, giving rise to persistent myths that women had “returned to the home” upon independence. Then, the 1984 Family Code reduced women’s status to that of minors in the country. Women rose up first to try to block the reform and then to denounce it in a moment widely considered the birth of Algeria’s modern feminist movement in the early 1980s (Lalami 2012; Rouadjia 2006).
Date: 01/25/2025
Primary URL: https://www.historians.org/events/annual-meeting/program/
Conference Name: American Historical Association's Annual Meeting

"Warda, 'The Algerian Rose': An Artist and a Refugee in Service of the Algerian Revolution" (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "Warda, 'The Algerian Rose': An Artist and a Refugee in Service of the Algerian Revolution"
Author: Elizabeth M. Perego
Abstract: Known as the “Princess of Arab Music,” Warda Al-Jazaira (“the Algerian Rose”) was a sensational star of the late twentieth-century Arabic music world. Given her fame, journalists have widely covered her beginnings as a precocious Franco-Algerian and -Lebanese teenager singing for famed Middle Eastern and North African artists in her father’s Parisian cabaret. They also trace her and her family’s deportation from France during the Algerian War of Independence for nationalist activities. Along with other lead divas of the Arab World (Hammad 2022), scholars have yet to evaluate Warda’s significance as a political figure, especially her activism for her father’s home country of Algeria both before and after her expulsion from France to Lebanon and then Egypt. Drawing upon interviews and police and colonial archives, I demonstrate that, in deporting Warda from France despite her status as a French citizen, French authorities sent one of the strongest and most appealing artists of her generation to the very center of Pan-Arabism and Algerian nationalists’ diplomatic efforts to secure liberation from French colonialism. Warda ultimately used her signature voice and style to win audiences around the Arab World over to the Algerian nationalist cause, a process this presentation reconstructs.
Date: 03/27/2025
Primary URL: https://dllc.appstate.edu/news-events/dllc-spring-symposium
Conference Name: Appalachian State University Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Symposium 2025 - Changing World: Travels, Nations & Cultures

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