Une pensée-autre du corps: Le sexe et la sexualité dans la fiction contemporaine marocaine en langue française

Abstract

This thesis examines certain contemporary Moroccan novels written in French which seem to focus on sex and sexuality. We ask the question: why this emphasis by the eight writers of our corpus on an element which so strongly challenges Moroccan norms? Our search for answers begins with an overview of contemporary Morocco - its regulatory, socio-cultural and literary environments - which has formed all these writers. However, this is insufficient to explain the writing of these authors which, we assert, is more than a simple attempt to smash taboos incorporated in the social structure. We therefore turn to the writing of the late Moroccan thinker, Abdelkébir Khatibi, and in particular to his concept of other-thinking, la pensée-autre, a phenomenon of thinking beyond the normative, allowing the contemplation of both the unknown and the possibility of transformative difference. Khatibi’s concept of other-thinking, along with other notions which derive from it, provides a fruitful theoretical framework for the study of the novels in our corpus. According to Khatibi, it is the duty of all writers to take up their pen with the aim of freeing those who are otherwise confined to the narrows of dogmatic thinking. Their writing should be transformative, challenging the knowledge, the certitudes and the values characteristic of societies constructed on dogma. We find that the writers in our corpus enact Khatibi’s notion in a way that is peculiar to them, which we call an “other-thinking of the body”. Their writing has a visceral quality, describing the often unjust, brutal and, above all, physical daily lot of ordinary Moroccans; which is why the other-thinking of the characters in their works is often expressed by sexual means. We also find that, in the case of the majority of the writers, the sex and sexuality so present in their works is not an end in itself. It is rather a detonator for their larger criticism of Morocco, a country which they believe has lost its humanity. In this context, we consider their critique of growing fundamentalism, the criminalization of homosexuality, relationships between men and women, and social hypocrisy.