While Mehdi Charef and Azouz Begag wrote their début novels during a time of curiosity tinged with concern about the North African immigrant population in France, mainstream media conversations about immigration quickly shifted focus. In the 1980s, discussions of identity politics in France had concentrated on the immigrant community as a whole, with journalists and interviewees emphasizing desires to find jobs and to gain recognition as full-fledged members of French society. Topics of conversation centred on the challenges this population faced but wanted to overcome, such as racism and discrimination. Gender within this community did not receive much attention in the 1980s, as both men and women participated actively in the beur political movement and petitioned for the same opportunities as their Franco-French peers. While the first Marche pour l'égalité was organized primarily by young men, female marchers participated with equal force. And, as noted in Chapter III, the second march, Convergence 84, was organized by Farida Belghoul, who gave the keynote address in Paris and was featured on posters and publicity campaigns.

By the early 1990s, however, media presentations of immigration-related matters shifted dramatically. Journalists turned more specifically toward questions of religion and violence within the immigrant community and cited these phenomena as threatening and dangerous to mainstream French society. Politicians and media commentators generally attributed this violence to two possible causes: delinquency or religious extremism, with the recognition that delinquency could feed into religious extremism, particularly through recruitment in prisons. These factors were identified as particularly affecting the young male population, and television programmes started emphasizing gendered concerns within the North African population in France. As Nacira Guénif-Souilamas and Éric Macé have explained, mainstream discourse about the North African male population in France turned into ‘la figure du jeune Arabe des quartiers, individu incivil, incivilisé, génétiquement voué à demeurer en deçà de la civilisation.’