Foundering men, thriving women: Gender, politics, and the crisis of masculinity in Haiti and Algeria

This dissertation examines the gender politics undergirding representations of political crisis in a corpus of texts that engages two postcolonial Francophone cultures: Haiti and Algeria. It will analyze films and novels produced in Haiti and Algeria in one of four time periods: the Duvalier dictatorships in Haiti (1957-1986), the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962), Jean-Bertrand Aristide's rise and fall from the Haitian presidency (1990-2004), and Algeria's civil war (1992-1999). As the political conflicts that define each period intensify in the two countries, they provoke economic and social dislocations that then produce a similar crisis of masculinity for both Haitian and Algerian men. While men are immobilized by economic disenfranchisement, alienation from their roles as providers and fathers, and the mounting threat of physical violence from nationalist forces, women adapt more easily to these challenges and emerge empowered by new forms of agency.;The construction of femininity is central to understanding the effects of these political, economic and social crises on male subjectivity in the six francophone texts of this study. While I draw from a variety of critical and theoretical sources including postcolonial, gender, queer, masculinity, and women's studies, my comparative approach is primarily informed by the work of Third World feminists such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Marnia Lazreg who assert there are numerous ways of living a postcolonial condition like that found in Haiti and Algeria. Although their work is primarily interested in women, their elucidation of the construction of gender helps me map out the crisis of masculinity at work in this corpus of texts to ultimately show that men founder under the challenges presented in such tumultuous times while women thrive.