Frantz Fanon - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Frantz Fanon

“Unveiling Algeria”Slide2

Fanon (1925-1961)

psychiatrist, revolutionary, theoristSlide3

biography

Born in Martinique, then a French colony

Studied psychiatry in France; wrote

Black Skin, White Masks

(1952)

Went to work in a psychiatric hospital in Algeria, a French colony

1954: Joined the Front de Liberation

Nationale

, the Algerian revolutionary group

1961:

The Wretched of the EarthSlide4

“Unveiling Algeria”

The veil: signifier of Arab society and its women: “she who hides behind the veil” (36)

The colonial specialists fixated on the veil; women seen as victims of native patriarchy; a medieval and barbaric practice

Native reaction: preserving a constructed tradition

The essay traces the checkered history of the veil in Algeria--its strategic adoption and repudiation, and a re-adoption in the final phase of the revolution--that, according to

Fanon

is entirely modern and evidence of the veil's "historical dynamism" (63), for the traditional sense of the veil had been exorcised through the medium of the revolution. Slide5

Colonial images of Algerian womenSlide6

Transforming the rules of engagement

Drawing

critically on the traditional conceptual equation of femininity and space such that "both are charged with absence of politics" or "the inability to act politically", Fanon opens his description of the Arab city, soft, feminized, as surrounded and "immobilized" by the aggressive masculinized power of Europeans

. This dynamic of sexualized

territorialization

leaves the Algerian woman "exposed"

.

In response to this siege, the Arab town weaves a "protective mantle" and "organic curtain of safety" around the woman in the city who is firmly located at home (51). It is precisely and specifically the revolutionary nationalist upsurge that changes these terms of engagement. Slide7

Towards freedom

What is unveiled in Fanon’s text is neither an essence (native woman) nor a passage into freedom (native woman who is emancipated), but a demonstration of the uses that Algerian women make of their assignation as subjects lacking agency, thereby enabling them to evade the logic of their discursive determination as such. Slide8

Sadia

Abbas, “The Echo-Chamber of Freedom”

The language of individualism and freedom, secularism and modernity—

hegemonised

by the West; used to mark boundaries

The case of Turkey (as in

Pamuk’s

novel

Snow

)—state-enforced secularism, leading to a pan-Islamist reaction against secularism, associated with the decline of Islamic powerSlide9

Engendering Islam

The choice to wear the veil subjected to manipulation by both the state and the Islamists

Women’s suicides—refusing the world: “Self

-extinction emerges as a refusal to surrender to extinction by someone else, as a tragically ironic form of self-

assertion.” ( 159)

the veil as metonym: “The

Muslim woman is the object of imperial rescue, justification for imperial warfare, Orientalist cipher, target of jihadist violence, and, increasingly, the discursive site upon which the central preoccupation of our time—how do you free yourself from freedom?—is worked out

.” Slide10

Academic discourse

Women as bearers of Muslim identity

Anxieties generated by the veil: both

philic

and phobic

Badiou

, Scott, Le

Carre

,

Puar

,

Mahmood

“adjudicating among Muslims”

“an

erasure of struggles over patriarchy and misogyny in Muslim

contexts”

Scott: coercion reworked as tradition, religion into culture

“

w

ithin

the

postsecularist

universe, there can be no secular or anti-Islamist Muslims or Muslim reformers.14 There is, in other words, a recurrent invocation of the plurality of

Islamicate

cultures and yet a continuous

subsumption

of most Muslims to the most orthodox

kinds.” (p. 165)Slide11

Nawal

el-

Sadaawi, b. 1931

Egyptian doctor, writer, feministSlide12

Woman at Point Zero (1975)

Set in Egypt, under the rule of Pres. Sadat (1970-1981), succeeding Pres. Nasser who had come to power after the Egyptian revolution of 1952. Moved Egypt to the

centre

.

Critique of the

masculinist+capitalist

nation state that manages and polices the cultural, economic and social spaces available to women

Production of normative (domestic) femininitySlide13

Gender and class

the

structural

implementation of this normative domestic

femininity--the

economic spaces available for specifically working and lower-middle class women are restricted to the domestic sphere.

The

limitation of discourses of normative femininity to the domestic sphere is not portrayed simply as cultural dogma, but the materialisation of a set of structural policies instituted by the state. Slide14

Structural limits

Firdaus

’ early history is situated as typical for a girl of her

class—the only

economically viable, and therefore available space for a rural, working class girl, is in the domestic sphere. As a “poor peasant farmer”, her father’s decision to “sell his virgin daughter for a dowry” is portrayed as being as economically necessary as knowing how to “grow crops” (10). Indeed, as she is unable to inherit money or participate in waged labour, it is only through marriage that

Firdaus

’ body can be economically sustained.

This

structural limitation is re-emphasised when

Firdaus

’ brief time in education, which allows her to temporarily occupy a space outside the private sphere, comes to an end, as it is no longer economically viable for her to continue

.

The inability of

Firdaus

’ uncle, as a “government official” whose salary “only rises by a few

millimes

” (37) amidst increasing living costs determines the choices available to

Firdaus

. Slide15

The exchange of bodies

a powerful critique of the structural reduction of the female body to a productive and reproductive role under capitalism, through the recurring motif of prostitution as a metaphor for womanhood.

Having

illustrated the fundamentally economic necessity of marriage, El-

Saadawi

uses

Firdaus

, who has lived both as a wife and a prostitute, to demonstrate how the political economy of the female body is consistent

in

both roles. As

Firdaus

states, under a capitalist economy, women are forced “to sell their bodies at a price” as they give up sexual autonomy in exchange for economic security. Slide16

The sexual economy

marital sex is exclusively portrayed as marital rape, or as sex in which the wife is entirely passive. This is because the economic necessity of marriage for women renders them powerless

sexually.

W

hilst

married to Sheikh Mahmoud,

Firdaus

“surrenders” her “body to his body” like a “piece of dead wood” (47). Things are no different for her uncle and his wife, despite her endorsement of marriage; in response to her refusal of him, he tells her, “you woman, you”, to submit as “I’m your husband and you’re my wife” (40). Slide17

Body as instrument

This sexual dynamic is mirrored by

Firdaus

’ experience as a prostitute, where she too would passively “lay on the bed, crucified” as “every hour a man would come in” (61)

.

In light of this,

Firdaus

’ circumcision at the beginning of her narrative becomes more than a cultural practice. It is also an economic one, as by removing her ability to experience sexual pleasure, her body is prepared for its place within the capitalist economy; that is, an

instrumentalised

body exchanged for economic security.

the

capitalist nation-state creates a structural situation in which, particularly poor women, cannot escape a singular,

commodified

political economy of the female body. The state’s economic

structure--a

key force in the production of a narrowly defined notion of normative, alienated femininity. Slide18

Limits of solidarity

the

structural limitation of women to the home impedes the possibility of spaces in which female bonds can be formed

.

Firdaus

moves from home to home, in which she is economically dependent on a male breadwinner and isolated from other women. When this is not the case, she is largely living alone as a prostitute.

El

-

Saadawi

portrays some contexts in which

Firdaus

is able to interact with other women, such as at school and in her brief time working as a secretary. Indeed, El-

Saadawi

uses these moments to demonstrate the importance of female relationships; the ability of women in these spaces to “reveal” their “depths to one another” (24) are emphasised as highlights within an otherwise bleak narrative

.

 Slide19

Solidarity, contd.

In particular, her experience at the school allows

Firdaus

to gain some political consciousness in solidarity with her female colleagues; she finds herself “riding high up on the shoulders of girls” at a protest shouting “down with the government” (24).

In the context of state monopolisation of feminist culture, this is a subversive moment. However,

Firdaus

’ access to these spaces is either not sustainable or limited by the patriarchal context in which they exist. Education is not economically viable, and the office is still ultimately a misogynistic space in which women are expected to trade sexual favours with their male bosses in return for promotions.

In this way, El-

Saadawi

demonstrates the importance of female bonds, and yet their impossibility within the context she is signifying. Slide20

Representation

Whilst

El-

Saadawi

situates the first-person narrative as the “story of a real woman” (1) whom she met as a psychiatrist at

Qanatir

Prison, the framed narrative structure precludes the interpretation of the novel as a direct representation of

Firdaus

’ life

.

Firdaus

’ story is preceded and followed by El-

Saadawi’s

story of meeting her; indeed, the novel charts the development of both

Firdaus

and the fictionalised representation of El-

Saadawi

. In this way, El-

Saadawi

as a novelist clearly exercises creative control. The novel must therefore be read as her artistic

re-

presentation of

Firdaus

’ story.