Gender, violence and representation in three Algerian women's films

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on a feminist aesthetics of violence that distinguishes Algerian women filmmakers’ treatment of violence from that of earlier male filmmakers. Such feminist aesthetics reveal how questions of gender and nation have moved to the forefront of analyses of the roots and repercussions of institutionalised violence. Through their female protagonists, Yamina Bachir's Rachida (2002), Djamila Sahraoui's Barakat (2006) and Yema (2013) represent traumatic events and their effects on women during the civil war that engulfed Algeria during the 1990s. The article demonstrates how these films subvert gender norms through embodied performance. It also shows how these films undermine normative femininity and masculinity, taking on gender politics in a performative mode that seeks to represent female victims of violence as agents of change, defying both the gender binary and a politics of representing victimhood.