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Fourth Wave Feminism In Morocco
Abstract
This paper examines the growth of fourth-wave feminism in post-Arab Spring Morocco. Drawing on previous modalities of feminist engagement, this new gendered activism is rooted in a heightened sense of bitterness with the country’s misogynistic, repressive, and conservative culture, state, and the religious order that deny women their autonomy through enacting a regime of discipline and punishment. It explores how the development of digital technology, and the global protest culture that grew in the post-2000 economic recession-era, spawned the language, strategies, and modalities of mobilizing and organizing protests in the country. On the one hand, my work explores the significance of social media that has profoundly changed the process of knowledge construction and dissemination of issues of gender and social inequities. This anonymous, non-hierarchal, and democratic media, which helps skirt traditional gatekeeping mechanisms, and enables new ways of thinking and modes of operating (Chamberlain 2017), has been charged by some with reproducing neoliberal feminist framework (Rottenberg 2018, Ghadery 2019). However, the sheer number of stories shared via hashtags debunks such accusations and displays “collective experiences of structural inequality” promoting solidarity among individuals (Ghadery: 261). The paper illustrates its claim through a case study of the web series Marokkiates (2017, 2018), Zainab Fasiki’s illustrations (2017-2022), and the Moroccan Outlaws’ manifestos (2019-2022). On the other hand, this paper also brings into its fold the land rights activism carried out by women in Morocco’s rural areas. It does this to complicate the urban elitist status of women’s leadership to make space for the language for rural women’s struggle against land dispossession and understand the local and regional growth of this popular, nationwide uprising that is truly intersectional in its reach, modality, and objective.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
Middle East/Near East Studies