The Myth of Masculinity in the Films of Merzak Allouache

Abstract

The Algerian filmmaker Merzak Allouache has made a series of films that describe the formations of masculinity in Algeria of the post-Independence period. The present paper focuses on three feature films made between the dates of 1976 and 2002, tracing the director's initial framing of mythical discourses of masculinity to an increasingly oppositional and alternative gender construction of the last film. The paper locates a nexus of discourses (colonial, national, Islamist) that inform the construction of masculinity in Algeria. It argues that a critical look at representations of masculinity is central to an analysis of North African identity due to the patriarchal nature of its traditional society, a society which has been in a state of transformation since the colonial and postcolonial periods. The construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms of difference—racial and sexual. Such an articulation becomes crucial if it is held that the body is always simultaneously (if conflictually) inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power. (Bhabha, 1994, p. 67)