Institute For Middle East Studies

When Moroccan leftist feminists narrate their life stories and talk about formative influences in their lives, many recall the influence of a “traditional” and pious father figure who was just and egalitarian, and who inspired their commitment to and struggle for gender equality. If this positive invocation of an enabling tradition is noteworthy for how consistently it recurs in the life stories of a cross-section of Moroccan leftist feminists, it is equally notable for how dramatically it disappears and is displaced by a notion of tradition as obstacle to women’s emancipation and progress.

In her new paper, Dr. Guessous juxtaposes invocations of the “traditional, pious but egalitarian” father figure with that of “the failed and disappointing leftist husband who claims to be modern but is in fact traditional” in order to complicate our understanding of the relationship between feminism and tradition and to think about the imperatives of modern progressive politics. She argues that the tragedy of Moroccan leftist feminist subjectivity lies in the fact that it is predicated on locating the possibility of women’s progress and feminist politics in the repudiation of the very tradition that makes it possible in the first place; and that this constitutive disavowal comes in the way of a more generous ethos of intergenerational and intersubjective engagement.