Moroccan Feminist Subjectivities and the Ethics of Relationality

This essay is a meditation on Moroccan women’s subjectivities through an intergenerational lens that connects three generations of Moroccan women: my grandmother who lived through the colonial period (1920s–1950s), my mother whose experiences are marked by the transition into independence and nation building (1950s–1970s), and my own experiences located in the postcolonial era and the surge of globalization (1980s–to present). I conceptualize women/womxn’s spaces (where I locate my feminist subjectivity) as liberatory sites of intergenerational knowledge because men did not have access to them (albeit temporarily). By weaving my family’s microhistory into the macro-histories of the 20th and 21st centuries, what emerges from this telling is a re-evaluation of an indigenous ethics of interconnectivity as a necessary critique of the brutality of global capitalism and its violent practice of disposability. I locate women’s spaces as sites of contestation of colonialism and nationalism while addressing the limits of institutional knowledge as a patriarchal tool that has systemically undermined Moroccan women’s contributions to knowledge production. Through the emotional act of remembering and weaving personal and public histories of Moroccan women, I have come to realize that my own subjectivity is intersubjective, intergenerational and grounded in the conception of a future feminist imaginary only possible through radical inclusivity.