Colonial pressure on women’s status trapped Algerians in a double bind on reform

Evidence

Within the Manichean world created by colonialism, women’s bodies remained the terrain on which men sought to articulate their desires and fears. Moderate Algerians advocating an improvement of women’s status (again in the name of strengthening the indigenous) found themselves having to distinguish their political policies from colonial ones. In such an environment, it was far easier for those making the case for a return to indigenous traditions to advocate a kind of ‘reverse orientalism.’ That is, what the French thought to suppress in the name of penetrating Native culture was the very thing the nationalists would seek to revitalize. Drawing on Marnia Lasreg’s conclusion that before colonial conquest the Algerians perceived their Muslimness not very differently from the way the French perceived of themselves as Christians, Yegenoglu reminds us of Gayatri Spivak’s observation that the figure of the woman disappears here in ‘the violent shuttling’ between tradition and modernization. Neither Muslim women nor Muslim men have any history, content, or specificity and all we ever know of them from culture-clash explanations is that they are stuck in pre-history. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 242

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the double-bind faced by colonized reformers generally — cf. Chatterjee’s account of the nationalist resolution of the women’s question in India. — connects to: Cassin used women’s status to justify withholding rights from Muslim colonies — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 270; the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”
• DEEPTHINKING: The colonial double bind — moderates forced to distinguish themselves from colonial policy while hardliners leverage the colonizer’s own suppression — is a dense structural insight about how colonial rule distorts indigenous reform.
• ADDENDUM: Directly complicates and extends the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ article: dress and women’s bodies as the terrain of political struggle, now under colonial pressure.