The notion of womanhood or femininity occupies a fraught position in Djebar's work. She is on the one hand clearly preoccupied with Algerian women's particular experiences, narrating numerous scenes of female oppression and liberation occurring at different moments in the history of the country. She sets out to retrieve suppressed feminine voices as she reflects on the relation between women and writing, and on the importance of creating a sense of agency through self-expression. On the other hand, however, Djebar also unsettles the very category of femininity, dissociating herself from women's writing movements and contesting the validity of any specified notion of feminine experience. She retells the history of women in Algeria while simultaneously questioning whether ‘woman’ names a meaningful position or a coherent mode of identification. Rejecting the term ‘écrivaine’, she seeks to transcend conventional gender distinctions and to overthrow the attribution of divisive, classificatory labels such as ‘feminist’. If Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement and L'Amour, la fantasia set up a quest for (post)colonial Algerian women's identity only to present their diverse female characters as unique, singular and resistant to appropriation, then in the next group of texts this tension comes both to structure and to complicate the author's development of a feminist critique.