Contingent modernity: Moroccan women's narratives in 'post' colonial perspective

Struggles over modernity, while often about political and economic power, rely on a process of othering to justify violence and relations of domination. My aim in this study is to show how representations of Moroccan women and control over their bodies are central to these struggles which are rooted in unequal political-economic relations and notions of otherness established during colonial modernity and reproduced through current neoliberal geopolitics. By looking historically at how modernity was posited in Morocco through European colonialism, then reworked by certain Moroccan nationalists, and now challenged again by Islamic fundamentalists, I demonstrate some of the ways in which dominant discourses of modernity work to impose particular gendered relations of power and constructions of Moroccan women's identity. I focus on the central importance that the construction of the "modern" Moroccan woman has played in this process and the role she has been meant to play in the edification of the modern nation-state and national identity. Working with in-depth interviews I conducted with Moroccan and French-Moroccan women in Morocco and in France, I explore the connections between dominant discourses of modernity and the construction of Moroccan women's identities through an examination of women's rights activism, discourses of women's freedom and moral geographies, and women's experiences of literacy classes. Thus, this project investigates the ways that gender has been implicated in specific projects and discourses of modernity in Morocco and how dominant notions of modernity have worked to impose particular constructions of Moroccan women's identity and influence their mobility and sense of self. I argue throughout this study that context is critical to understanding the ways in which political debates over modernity take shape and evolve, and particularly how women's bodies are implicated in the process. I show how representations of Moroccan women and control over their bodies are central to these debates, while also suggesting how Moroccan women's narratives of experience can make apparent and sometimes challenge dominant conceptions of modernity and the universal values on which they depend, and serve as a basis for re-theorizing modernity as contingent.