Anti-colonial Struggles and Gender Oppression: The Emancipatory Power of Women Resisters’ Disappointment

Frantz Fanon’s unfulfilled hopes for decolonisation have often been invoked to theorise the failure of founding new communities in the wake of liberation from colonial rule. Less attention has been paid to his disappointment over the failure of women’s emancipation, which he imagined would result naturally from women’s political awakening and their involvement in the anti-colonial struggle. In this paper, I explore how the disappointment of women resisters can inspire resistance against the persistence of gender oppression in the wake of liberation from colonial rule. To articulate this potential of disappointment, I look to Assia Djebar—a prominent Algerian novelist and filmmaker who devoted most of her work to recording the unfulfilled promise of women’s emancipation. Drawing on Djebar, I argue that women resisters’ disappointment can act as a powerful epistemic and political tool. It can not only inspire women resisters to give voice to their complex resistance experience that has been silenced in dominant masculinist narratives of resistance, but also encourage them to fight against the resilient patterns of gender oppression post-liberation.