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Caring For vs Caring About Single Mothers and Abortion Seekers in Morocco
Abstract
In Morocco, where abortion and extramarital sex are illegal, single motherhood and abortion resonate with public concerns surrounding the integrity of the Moroccan family and changing social landscapes. Single-mother advocates’ work is an ambivalent process that blends the practical labor of care with the ideological work of advocacy and representation. The push and pull between admiration for single mothers who struggle on society’s margins, on one hand, and condemnation of abusers and child abandoners, on the other, contribute to the “towardness” and “awayness” (Ahmed 2015) bound up with caring about vulnerable subjects. NGO workers, struggling to provide services to single mothers, politicize the responsibility to provide care (“take care of”) by arguing that it is not enough to publicly express pity or solidarity (“care about”). By refusing performative solidarity, front-line workers seek to weave the question of responsibility into discussions of care. Moreover, caregivers’ daily reckoning with the patent failures of recent legal reforms to help vulnerable girls and women cast doubts on the substantiality of caring, itself. This paper considers caregiver rage as an oppositional stance, one that calls into question the possibility of providing care in neoliberal times. Drawing on fieldwork in NGOs and hospitals, this paper points to the limits of care in institutional spaces where writing, listening, and speaking are often the only services on offer.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
Ethnography