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Men’s struggle with Personal Status Code reforms in Morocco: Patriarchy revisited
Abstract
Legal reforms pertaining to Personal Status in Muslim-majority countries have proven to be highly politically charged affairs. Examples include vociferous debates surrounding One Million Signatures Campaigns in Iran, Morocco, and a strenuous process of first codifying Algerian Personal Status Code and then reforming it in the early 2000s. This is not only because Personal Status Codes (Family Codes) are perceived as the last remnants of the Islamic law in post-colonial MENA states and hence deeply relevant for the Muslim identity, but also because many men in particular see the reform as a zero-sum game. Most research on the reform process of Personal Status Code in Morocco (as elsewhere) focuses on the experiences of women and women’s rights, and leaves out the voices of men or treats them as women’s natural adversary and the main obstacle for their empowerment. Based on extensive ethnographic research in provincial Morocco, this paper brings in men’s voices and looks at the reasons behind their continuing struggle against the 2004 reforms of the Personal Status Code. I argue that rather than blaming men for the lack of implementation of and cooperation with the law, the heightened women’s rights discourse leaves these men out of the conversation assuming that ‘their’ rights have already been granted by virtue of being men living in a patriarchal state and society. In my conversations with Moroccan men from economically depressed and politically marginalized areas however, they expressed the enormity of the burden of family, societal, and legal demands placed on them as breadwinners in a neoliberal state where it is increasingly harder to get lucrative jobs that could satisfy the growing expectations of their (extended) families and consumerist wives in particular. Engaging with the marginalized male population can contribute to the understanding of the slow progress towards real change in the status of women’s rights in contemporary Muslim-majority MENA countries. Although many men will defend gender inequality as something that is god-given or a natural state of being, many also criticize the prevailing elite-driven women’s rights discourse not because of their misogynist attitudes but as a result of their disenfranchisement and economic and political marginalization. They criticize the women’s rights discourse because it does not see them as equal partners and does not offer real solutions to their own precarious situation.
Discipline
Law
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies