Document Type
Article
Abstract
This article examines Yamina Benguigui’s film Inch’Allah dimanche (2001) to probe questions of gender and nation in the context of transnational migration. An analysis of the historical drama, which recounts an Algerian family’s reunion in France during the 1970s, reveals how the migrant homemaker must negotiate her symbolic role as “bearer of the nation” in relationship to not one but two nations: the homeland left behind and the new homeland. This filmic study of “gender between nations” proposes the benefits of transnational studies that literally “move beyond the borders of the nation” to consider the frontiers of the body. A close reading of Benguigui’s intimate and multifaceted visualization of hijab—the controversial practice of Islamic veiling foregrounded in her early work—unveils the migrant homemaker’s complicated relationships to Algeria and France. This historical study offers a lens for comprehending the policing of Maghrebi women, and other women of Muslim and immigrant origins, in contemporary France, referencing legislation from 1989 to 2010 that regulates Islamic veiling in public.
Repository Citation
Donaldson, Olivia. "The Migrant Homemaker: Historicizing Gender between Nations in Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’Allah dimanche." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 10, no. 4, 2010, pp. 1–21. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol10/iss4/11