Gender and Religiosity in Digital Algeria: Between Empowerment and Surveillance in the Virtual Public Sphere

Abstract

This article examines how Algerian Muslim women negotiate gendered agency and religiosity through hashtag activism on Instagram, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter). Based on qualitative discourse analysis of publicly accessible posts, the study identifies four core patterns: empowerment and identity assertion, religious framing, symbolic surveillance, and resistance through irony. Findings highlight a digital paradox: platforms enable new forms of self-expression and pious subjectivity, yet simultaneously reproduce communal policing and algorithmic amplification of normative discourses. To capture this ambivalence, the article introduces the concepts of the “Digital Veil”-a metaphor for how visibility is curated and constrained-and “Subversive Piety,” referring to ironic and aesthetic strategies of resistance. By situating these dynamics in a North African, Muslim-majority context, the study contributes to Global South feminist scholarship, challenging universalist readings of empowerment while emphasizing localized negotiations of identity, visibility, and digital governance.

The analysis of 150 posts and 330 coding units, with an intercoder reliability of 0.82, ensures methodological robustness. This study thus contributes to feminist digital ethnography by foregrounding localized forms of agency in North Africa.