ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the complex uses of religion to negotiate gender constructs and relations between the sexes, as well as to cope with discriminatory experiences, in France among a group of diasporic North African Kabyle people, who speak a Berber language and French. A number of French military colonial governors contended that Kabyles were closer to French than to Algerian Arabs, and showed greater promise to be integrated into the French polity than their Arabic-speaking counterparts. Disjunctive moments occur when women’s and men’s performances deviate from the roles into which French colonizers, Berber nationalist activists, and church officials in their own ways have created competing pressures for them as they attempt to balance modernist gender ideology with village-based morality. Holy spaces are somewhat divided but both men and women traverse similar spaces in the important practice of testimonies, relating conversion experiences.
