Paste your essay in here…Three women of Algiers, steely-eyed and single-minded, unveil in front of a mirror, cutting and dyeing their hair and applying lipstick while a propulsive drumbeat ratchets up the tension. This scene, from Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, intimately depicts the transformation that these three FLN guerillas must undergo before carrying out deadly bombing attacks against Algiers’ French colonists. By shedding their veils and presenting themselves in a conventionally attractive European style, they are able to circumvent the checkpoints that the French paramilitary has established in the Casbah and execute bold terrorist strikes impossible for their male counterparts. By unveiling on their own terms, they have weaponized the pervasive French colonial eye against itself, obscuring their revolutionary political action. The sequence in Battle of Algiers is a cinematic analogue to the analytical work Fritz Fanon is performing in the “Algeria Unveiled” chapter of his 1959 book, A Dying Colonialism. This essay aims to illustrate how Fanon’s study of the Algerian women can be understood as a subversion of modern disciplinary power and the panopticon’s “scopic regime” outlined by Michael Foucault in his 1975 work Discipline and Punish. Interpolated into this discourse, the unveiling of Algerian women represents a particularly multifaceted and fraught act of political resistance, one with implications for the confluence of colonialism, gender, and violence.
Throughout this text, Foucault traces the changing nature of punishment in the West – beginning with the spectacularly grisly public dismemberment of an attempted regicide in mid 18th century France and culminating with the indefinite interrogation of modern penality. This more evolved and sober form of punishment occurs behind closed doors and is fundamentally about identity. It is interested not in the nature of the crime itself, but in what the crime reveals about the criminal. Judging motivations naturally necessitates the entrance of third-party “experts” like psychiatrists, doctors, or educators. This battery of people can either determine motivation or find extenuating circumstances, that is to say, “a whole set of assessing, diagnostic, prognostic, normative judgements concerning the criminal have become lodged in the framework of penal judgement” (19). This form of power represents a drastic break from the top-down power relations of the past, such as feudalism or slavery, that were premised on explicit forms of domination and coercion. Foucault then brings in the dyad of knowledge-power, to signify that power is constructed through accepted forms of knowledge, such as scientific understanding and culturally contingent criterion for the ‘truth’. These new more discrete and diffuse microforms of power are typically tied to new forms of knowledge, such as education, psychology, sexuality, and gender. In staking this broad reform in society as his research horizon, Foucault is primarily interested in forms of punishment became forms of discipline.
For the scope of this inquiry, the most relevant portion of Discipline and Punish is the chapter titled, “Panopticism”, in which Foucault indelibly repurposes the panopticon, a system of control designed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The panopticon was first theorized as the architectural layout of a prison, structured so that the prisoners’ cells encircle a lofty transparent watch tower, which thus maintains a vantage into each cell. The purpose of such a design is to induce a constant feeling of being watched in each inmate, so that even though a prisoner can never tell if they are actually under the guard’s eye, they come to internalize and discipline their own surveillance. A gaze of unequal power has been established – a permanent visibility to which Foucault refers as the “scopic regime”. But the operation of this regime is not limited to prisons, as Foucault notes, “Bentham dreamt of transforming into a network of mechanisms that would be everywhere and always alert, running through society without interruption…The panoptic arrangement provides the formula for this generalization. It programmes…the basic functioning of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms” (209). In Foucault’s rendering, the panopticon is a blueprint for modern society, one in which the microforms of power that lead citizens to become self-disciplining have seeped into nearly every aspect of daily life. Thus, as Foucault concludes, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (228). The panopticon further serves to capture the great irony of the Enlightenment – what Bentham envisioned as a rational and humanizing system ends up serving as a totalizing tool for the re-enslavement of the individual.
Though Foucault is writing later than Fanon and is focused on French society from an insider perspective rather than critiquing its colonial project, there is a clear congruity between the texts. Like Foucault’s modern disciplinary society, the Western imperialism described by Fanon uses technologies of power to aid its goal of subjugating and homogenizing indigenous populations. The occupation of Algeria consists not just in the military checkpoints or segregated neighborhoods, but more precisely it is present in “the very center of the Algerian individual and [undertakes] a sustained work of cleanup, of expulsion of self, of rationally pursued mutilation” (65). The choice of the word “mutilation” perversely recalls the gory quartering of the attempted regicide in Foucault. Yet whereas that spectacular ceremony symbolized the triumph of the state in a violent duel against the individual, Algerian occupation reflects the interrogation and adjudication Foucault links to discipline. Characterizing this mutilation as “rationally pursued” also ties Fanon to Foucault, as both are implicitly registering critiques of the Enlightenment and its regime of truth.
Fanon explicitly develops the panoptic gaze of power in “Algeria Unveiled”, which proves crucial for contextualizing the act of resistance he is interrogating. The site of his interest is the veil (or haïk), that totem of the Muslim woman, which has become, “the bone of contention in a grandiose battle” (36). The colonial authorities, in order to militate against the matrilineal fabric of Algerian society, direct myriad disciplinary mechanisms at the veil, “Around the family life of the Algerian, the occupier piled up a whole mass of judgements, appraisals, reasons, accumulated anecdotes and edifying examples, thus attempting to confine the Algerian within a circle of guilt” (38). Fanon notes the discrete ways that this power is exercised by the French in everyday interactions. As Fanon observes, European bosses will extend invitations to holiday parties to Algerian men and their wives, knowing full well that this is a breach of traditional social decorum. By wielding this kind of sly cudgel, the colonist is able to force the Algerian man into an irresolvable dilemma, he can either capitulate to the imperial situation or risk his livelihood. This is cultural imperialism as conceived by Foucault, an immaterial power impinging into the home and attempting to govern and regulate the family structure.
One of Fanon’s most penetrating analyses, and one that complicates this discourse, is positioned within the realm of psychoanalysis. For the French occupiers, uncovering the veil is a symbolically loaded colonizing mission, “Every veil that fell…every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer” (42). The gaze of power is also loaded with the latent threat of sexual violence and exploitation. This represents the disturbing mingling of sexual and sadistic fantasies occurring throughout Algiers, borne out through the torture and humiliation of prisoners not unlike that which would repeat itself fifty years later in Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay. The issue of the veil is also one of classification and legibility, “Unveiling this women woman is revealing her beauty; it is baring her secret, breaking her resistance, making her available for adventure. Hiding the face is also disguising a secret…the European experiences his relation with the Algerian woman at a highly complex level” (44). Veiled women present a problem for the French occupier because they evade the gaze of power, they possess a disturbing unknowability. This also imparts a clear warning to Fanon’s contemporary reader – they must greet with intense skepticism any claim made in varying degrees on French beaches or in Iraqi villages that unveilings are liberating and even “saving” Muslim women.
What then happens when women join the violent struggle of the FLN? The veil itself becomes the vital implement in their revolt against the occupier. By unveiling, Algerian women can become important revolutionary agents, smuggling weapons throughout the city in plain sight. Yet, this is no simple transformation to affect, Fanon tracks the warring impulses that unveiling unleashes, “The unveiled body seems to escape, to dissolve…She experiences a sense of incompleteness with great intensity…The absence of the veil distorts the Algerian woman’s corporal pattern” (59). There is a profound sense of disassociation enacting itself within the unveiled Algerian woman, the sundering of two identities within one body resulting in a dizzying sense of freedom. This particular bodily ambiguity represents something indefinite and subtle. That is to say, it is the awkward chrysalis incubating a novel sense of femininity, one pitched between the predatory eye of the occupier and the conservative expectations of traditional Algerian society. The unveiled woman gains agency and rejects structure when she chooses to shed her veil for the anti-colonial cause. Thus, “the Algerian woman who walks stark naked into the European city relearns her body, re-establishes it in a totally revolutionary fashion” (59). To Fanon, the unveiled woman is such a compelling subject because through emancipating herself she confounds labels and carves out a new conception of Algerian womanhood. Fanon synopsizes this mutation, “What had been used to block the psychological or political [read disciplinary here] offensives of the occupier became a means, an instrument. The veil helped the Algerian woman to meet the new problems created by the struggle” (63). Fanon is hopeful about this act of political resistance will give rise to new attitudes and modes within Algerian society.
No discussion of Fanon, and consequently of the unveiled female FLN revolutionaries, is complete without scrutinizing the role of violence. Relevant to this essay is the particular question of whether or not it is possible to resist the scopic regime without resorting to taking up arms and engaging in guerilla warfare. In “Algeria Unveiled”, Fanon elicits his reader’s empathy for the plight and courage of the female revolutionary without providing his audience a way to account for modern terrorism. One way to approach this stumbling block is to recontextualize Fanon within the Western canon. When he writes about violence, particularly as he does in his 1961 essay “On Violence” from The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon is shunting aside ethical considerations. For Fanon, anti-colonial resistance is an issue of pure praxis, therefore he is able to divorce morality from the necessity of politics. One way to think about Fanon is as a Machiavelli for the oppressed. Just as the Italian statesman promoted brutal realpolitik in service to the larger ideal of republicanism, Fanon argues that it is only through the necessary and means of cleansing violence that the colonized subject can regain a humanity that has been systematically stripped from them. And yet even this answer proves to a certain degree unsatisfying – it does not require a reductionist reading to posit that the symbolic and postmodern violence that Fanon inculcates could be seen as an antecedent to al-Qaeda’s most infamous attacks against the West. Osama bin-Laden wrote in his “Letter to the American People” that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out due to Western imperial occupation in the Middle East and in a chilling parallel, “these governments give us a taste of humiliation, and places us in a large prison of fear and subdual”. Just as uneasy is the comparison between the panopticon and Western societies’ pervasive electronic surveillance systems, ostensibly built as a safeguard against terrorism.
This inquiry has up until now elided the reality that Foucault saw power as productive, in that it is what shapes people and their social relations. It is not just a form of repression, and all individuals are products of power relations, particularly governmentality. Foucault pairs the notion of individual with homogenization and in doing so problematizes a tenet of Enlightenment dogma. Far from being a rational and conscious Kantian being, the universal liberal citizen is in fact disciplined to be productive and compliant, while those who do not meet this definition, such as prisoners, women, and the insane, face judgement and rehabilitation. One such example of this is the Algerian woman – specialists, sociologists, and jurists reach conclusions about her condition and status, and the various “policy” to advocate unveiling ensue. More so than choosing to cling to the veil as a form of resistance, the choices made by the FLN women to remove and reassume it again and again puncture the veneer of the disciplinary mechanisms is shattered. In this framework, one may perhaps glimpse one final significance of unveiling, a bold declaration of heterogeneity.