Fear and Loathing in Orlando

[Vigil in Orlando commemorating victims of Pulse Mass Shooting. [Vigil in Orlando commemorating victims of Pulse Mass Shooting.

Fear and Loathing in Orlando

By : Maya Mikdashi

The drumbeats have started. Almost immediately after a mass shooting that left over fifty people dead on Latin night in a Florida gay nightclub, Pulse, the news shifted to the identity of the shooter himself. As soon as his name and the fact that his father immigrated (long ago) from Afghanistan was announced, the narrative began unfolding as Naeem Mohaiemen put it, on cue: This must be a terrorist attack. This is clearly an ISIS attack, or an attack pledging allegiance to ISIS, or someone who followed a feed of jihadi kittens a little too far down the twitter-hole. It smelled of ISIS, and the smell was coming, radiating off of the race and religion of the shooter. That same day a white man was stopped with a stockpile of weapons near LA Pride, but he was different—he was clearly disturbed—the news never became a narrative and quickly disappeared off our screens and thought pieces.

Newer reports emphasize that the killer may himself have had same sex desires and perhaps experiences. There is now another layer to this narrative: perhaps the killer was secretly gay and so self-loathing (because of his religion and “cultural” background”) that he walked into a packed nightclub with an assault rifle and shot out his frustration. Again, the cause of his inability to accept himself is the same culprit, Islam and “Muslim culture,” and not, as Lisa Duggan put it, the toxic masculinity that pervades a gun-obsessed and masculinist US security state at a time of war and empire. The United States is in the midst of an election cycle where bigotry, racism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-immigration, Islamophobia, gun-love, imperial hubris, and sexism are political platforms—and political and national culture is not something one can “opt out” or into depending on ethnicity, race, religion, sex, gender, or even “free will.”

There is a fascination with the fate of queer Muslims, and of the “fate” of LGBTQ individuals “in” Islam. Just today, before writing this piece, I rejected emails from three journalists who comments solely on “homophobia in Islam.” I have no problem stating the obvious: Islam is not welcoming to LGBTQ individuals or communities. My problem is that the rest of that sentence—that neither Judaism nor Christianity are— will not be heard or if heard, will be seen as a deluded apology. This fascination with the fate of queers “in” Islam or (slightly more carefully) “in the Middle East” is built on orientalist fantasies of sexual licentiousness and repression, as argued persuasively by Said and Massad. It is coupled with the strategic goals of a devastating war on terror that is being sold to the “civilized” world as a public good in service of human and sexual rights. This package is also built on the good intentions of homonationalist (and homophobic) assumptions that queers everywhere want the same things, face the same struggles (which are solely discrimination based on sexuality) and value their lives and those of their communities based solely through their experiences of their sexuality.   But homophobia is not geographically, or religiously, or racially, or class-distributed. It is pervasive, structural, super-structural, hegemonic, invisible, unavoidable. More than anyone else, queers know this. Queers are used to being told they are unnatural, monstrous, and dangerous to "the good life" or the order of things—whether it is science, government, religion, media, or society, or even lovers and friends and families and situations that remind you that you will never be anything other than "different."

There are no triangles, circles or other geographic shapes that can demarcate a population or religion or phenotype or (gasp) civilization as “the homophobic one.”  The sad truth is that homophobia and misogyny are unavoidable global hegemonic forces that shape everyday life. The United States is no exception to this rule. In the past six months over one hundred anti-LGBTQ bills and laws have been tabled and discussed across the United States. These are governmental and structural manifestations of the devaluing of queer life. The most prominent of these laws are all out assaults on trans bodies and their uses of bathrooms. This law will ensure that trans people will experience even more violence and hatred than they already do, and in an already vulnerable space (bathrooms). Queers of color, queer women of color, and trans people of color (especially trans black women) are daily assaulted, killed, incarcerated, criminalized, brutalized, and raped across this country. The criminalization and wholesale removal of homeless populations from our cities also disproportionately targets queers, and those that are most vulnerable, young queers of color. Yet these daily and hourly attacks (often against the more and most vulnerable within the LGBTQ community) rarely inspire national outrage, as Sima Shasksari reminds us. They do not elicit twenty-four news hour cycles or “special programming” on mainstream news outlets.

LGBTQ Arabs and Muslims are being scripted (just as women have been and continue to be) into a discourse that uses their bodies as barometers of how civilized and/or modern our communities are. This is happening when their communities are living through a war on terror that has killed at least one and a half million people, incarcerated and wounded many more. This war on terror has made the hyphen that holds together a “Muslim-American” an oxymoron. The hyphen is a source wonder and suspicion.  Moreover, Islamophobia and its twinning with homophobia (they are homophobic, therefore we can be Islamophobic) is a global phenomenon.  In Germany, the Netherlands, and many other “secular” European countries, Arab and Muslim immigrants are tested on how homophobic and/or sexist they are during the citizenship application process. Refugees fleeing war-torn Syria and Afghanistan, many of whom are currently sequestered in highly securitized camps across Europe, are spoken of as “dangers’ to a European culture of sexual rights and homosexual liberation. Part of their “training” and “screening” includes being watched as they watch homosexuals kissing and female nudity. It is perhaps no accident that in the center of Berlin there is a holocaust memorial dedicated to the queers (and suspected queers) who were detained, abused, killed and moved to concentration camps under Nazi Germany. This memorial consists of a video loop of two men kissing in a park while dressed in clothes from the 1930s, as Haritawarn has written. Thus the sins of Nazi Germany and the fears of far right resurgence in Germany are transposed (and erased), onto the bodies of Muslim applicants seeking citizenship or residency or refugee status. The Canadian government has also suggested that when accepting Syrian refugees, the priority would be for (heteronormative) families and gay individuals.

Are queer Arabs and Muslims and South Asians dehumanized to the extent that they are imagined to be individuals who can only be the victims (not for example, producers or leaders or simply lovers) of their communities and cultures? That the only way to live a valid (and not suspicious) queer life is to “come out” according to an American script that was and is written in the language of class, gender, and race-exclusion?  That we are so deeply hated and traumatized (but only by homophobia, for example, not by war or occupation or deportation or anti-immigration election platforms) that we can be separated from our communities, our loved ones, our families, in order to find safety in countries that are waging or enabling war against those very same loved ones? The fantasy here is of an individual who can be removed without being uprooted, who can be “saved” in pieces, and who must not demonstrate fear for their loved ones, but only fear of them.

The mass shooting in a gay club is Orlando is shocking in its spectacle and terrifying in its scope and in its’ targeting of Pride Month. In its wake, those that sit at that increasingly jagged intersection of Muslim and queer look over their shoulder even as they cry in mourning. We do not shed our religions or our races or our nationalities when we enter a gay bar, and we do not and cannot shed our queer selves on demand. Nobody can shake off any of the communities that made us, and the fantasy that we can or should be able to has destroyed many lives, families, and love-stories. We cannot choose to unbecome or for that matter, become— nobody can opt out of life-history. We are not sovereign autonomous entities bumping into, or walking past, each other, and as Judith Butler has written, why the hell would we want to be?

The stakes invovled in the twinning of Islamophobia and Homophobia, or, as Jaspir Puar has written, the use of homophobia as an excuse or cover for racism, are familiar.  These stakes put us in a place where we have to apologize or explain or disavow the actions of one man with an assault weapon who happens to be a brown and Muslim American, and perhaps even someone who “could not” reconcile his sexual and emotional desires with his religion or culture. But the killer was an American man, from Florida via Queens, and in a statement to the press his father expressed a grudging and smug “tolerance” of homosexuality by stating that humans should not punish each other for the sin of homosexuality because punishment for sin is the purview of God. Is this sentiment so different from the rhetoric of “love the sinner, hate the sin” that pervades church sermons and political speeches and dinner tables with equal measure across these United States?

Muslims and Arabs and South Asians are an integral part of the LGBTQ community in the United States, just as LGBTQs are integral members of their Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities. There is no irreconcilable difference between Islam and homosexuality beyond the fact that all major religions reject and violently condemn homosexuality. This fact has never stopped people of (or born into) all major religions from affiliating with the LGBTQ community. And it has never stopped religious extremists of all religions from threatening and enacting violence towards queer people of all religions. Homophobia is not a slur, it is not exceptional, it is not the same as a hate crime. It is pervasive, internalized, and perverse to the extent that when Arab heads of state that criminalize non-heteronormative sex reach out to the US government (which is currently struggling with 100 different anti-LGBTQ bills and laws) to express their condolences, no one blinks an eye. When representatives mainstream Muslim-American communities all of a sudden discover that "LGBTQs" are deserving of "tolerance," and when pro-gun and anti-gun safety government representatives denouncing violence against them in order to cover up their own complicity in mass shootings,  they expect applause.  But we know that violence against queers is violence against queers, whether the boot at your neck belongs to a man with mental problems, a border security guard or a woman delivering a deportation order, a man who is part of a terrorist network, a garden-variety homophobe, a closet case, or a man in some form of state uniform (judicial, police, correctional). Spare us your crocodile tears.

If queer lives matter, they should matter every day, not just on a day when the religion of the perpetrator of an atrocious mass killing serves the purposes of the local and transnational military industrial complex and the war on terror. Where is the outrage against the anti-trans agenda currently being pushed by state and federal representatives? If you care about the integrity of queer life and are outraged by violence and homophobia and the devaluing of queer life—that outrage should be constant. It should not only emerge when the perpetrator of the violence is politically expedient or fits neatly into a war on terror packaging of the world, a world where the clash of civilizations is fought on the surface of bodies already ravaged by heteropatriarchy.  

Or are queers only deserving of your prayers when someone even more feared and loathed by the United States mainstream kills them? 

This article is only made possible by long and inspiring, loving, and challenging conversations and silences with Sherene Seikaly and Rasha Moumneh.

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The Moroccan Non-Exception: 'Much Loved' and Realism, Colonialism, and Pornography in Moroccan Cinema

[The following is the second installment in "The Moroccan Non-Exception" Jadaliyya roundtable. Read the introduction here.]

A wave of contentious reactions have dominated the Moroccan media landscape following the release of Nabil Ayouch`s new film Much Loved, a fictional story about three Moroccan prostitutes in Marrakech. The reactions to the film are based on several extracts and a trailer that emerged online, some of which contained sexually explicit scenes. The excerpts were released just before the film’s screening at the Quinzaine des Realisateurs in Cannes. The reaction culminated with the Moroccan Ministry of Communications` illegal censorship of the film. The reactions to the film raised questions in Moroccan Francophone press, as well as among some European critics, about how viewers could be so angry at a film they have not yet seen in its entirety.

Labeling the entire backlash as reactionary, the Francophone press largely ignored the variety and complexity of the responses. Some of the writings have described public anger as “sick,” “retrograde,” violent, “anchored in tradition,” “medieval,” “Islamist,” and people as “packs,” “cowardly,” and “populist.” In one op-ed, the author speaks of “incomprehensible negative reactions,” a phrase reminiscent of the French journalist’s narration toward the end of The Battle of Algiers: “incomprehensible ululations coming from Kasbah.” Like the journalist struggling to understand why Algerians rebelled against colonialism, the Francophone press’ lack of comprehension demonstrates a detachment from the social, political, and historical context from which such a “revolt” can emerge. They view it merely as a symptom of Moroccan backwardness, rendering them incapable of understanding art.

This article brings into question the assertions critics made about the film, particularly with regard to the question of Realism, and about the contentious reactions toward it; to attempt to understand the widespread negative sentiment toward the film in a nuanced way, through a colonial and neo-colonial historical framework; and to shed light on the sexist and orientalist tendencies found in the film which partially incited the negative reactions. This piece is, above all, a commentary on the critiques (both in the press and among average Moroccans who firmly opposed the film) rather than a critique of the film itself. This article does not hesitate, however, to critically examine the film in order to better understand the anger leveled against it. The first section of this article is centered around the most common argument in favor of the film amongst critics: its realist portrayal of the act of prostitution and how some Moroccan critics claim it is an appropriate method of influencing society and changing sentiment toward prostitutes. The second part is an attempt to historically situate Moroccan cinema within a colonial and neo-colonial context in order to make sense of what could be the source of the “revolt” against the film. The last section, treading more along a fine line between a critique of the film itself and a critique of the critiques, addresses how the film can be seen as a continuation of both sexist and orientalist “colonial discourse” and how this discourse can be counterproductive to the film’s stated objective of changing attitudes toward prostitutes and women in general in Moroccan society. This piece draws from a large number of comments made on social media, discussions with Moroccans from various social classes who expressed their discontent with the film and notes on the almost omnipresent loud debates about the film that took place in Casablanca’s cafés throughout late May and early June 2015. Their thoughts and beliefs are presented throughout this article, in contrast with the assertions made by critics in the Francophone press and situated within the social and historical context that could have produced them. 

Reality vs. Realism 

Through a multitude of articles that emerged in the Francophone press (both Moroccan and French), some critics accused those who reacted negatively to the film of being incapable of understanding Realism. This accusation is the basis for almost all of the writings in defense of Much Loved. The film, according to those who defended it, is merely a depiction of a social reality (TelQuel’s Abdellah Tourabi goes as far as to say that the film is “between documentary and fiction”). Yet, it is precisely because the film claims to portray a social reality that it is subject to a social criticism. As Shohat and Stam highlight in citing Mikhail Bakhtin: “art is incontrovertibly social, not because it represents the real but because it constitutes a historically situated ‘utterance’-- a complex of signs addressed by one socially constituted subject or subjects to other socially constituted subjects, all of whom are deeply immersed in historical circumstance and social contingency.”[1]

Just like one can understand the “incomprehensible ululations coming from the Kasbah” after having understood the history of violence France inflicted upon Algerians, one can also understand the “incomprehensible negative reactions” after having understood Much Loved as a “historically situated ‘utterance.’” Popular frustration with the film, even if it is merely based on extracts, is not senseless, uniform, or random. This frustration is conscious, or partly conscious, of what is driving it and, when placed in a historical context of colonial domination and the current context of neo-colonial domination-- economic, social, political, and cultural-- can be understood as a sound reaction. “That something vital is at stake in these debates” about cinema, write Shohat and Stam, “becomes obvious in those instances when entire communities passionately protest the representations that are made of them in the name of their own experiential sense of truth.”

What is at stake in these debates is the masses’ lived reality or their conception of that lived reality. Therefore, people are not necessarily concerned with the film itself but rather with the violating function it serves and how it is affected by and affects that social reality from which it emerged. For this reason, it becomes ironic when, Mahi Binebine writes in “Allez censeurs du dimanche brulez tout!”  (Come on Amateur Censors, Burn it All!), that those reacting against the film are doing so because they are afraid of a "mirror image" of their society, when in fact most Moroccans experience or are familiar with the conditions that create that “mirror image.” To be clearer, the widespread dire conditions in Morocco--which vary from poverty to overall lack of proper education and healthcare--yield the circumstances and reality from which this "mirror image" emerges. Indeed, some of the contentious opinions that were loudly expressed in cafés, social media, and the Arabic language press toward the film were drawn from a proclaimed familiarity with reality (“we do not need Ayouch to come from France to tell us what we already know”) in order to criticize the film and a filmmaker whom they perceive as paternalistic.

A vast majority of Francophone critics ignored his perceived paternalism, many actually glorified Ayouch as a benevolent figure and--after the film’s censorship--described him as a liberal martyr “lynched” by intolerant mobs. Preoccupied by the intensity of negative reactions, most Francophone critics failed to question the filmmaker’s self-proclaimed benevolence and evaluate the effectiveness of the film’s Realist approach toward achieving its stated objective of affecting social change. Some critics have treated the “accurate and realistic portrayal," indisputably, as the most effective way to change Moroccan society through film. No questions were asked about whether, to put it in Tomas Guiterez Alea’s words,  “cinema can draw viewers closer to reality without giving up its condition of unreality, fiction, and other-reality” or whether it “brings about in viewers, once they have stopped being viewers and are facing that other aspect of reality (the viewers’ own life, their daily reality), a series of reasonings, judgments, ideas and thus a better comprehension of reality itself and an adaptation of their behavior, of their practical activity.”[2] 

Indeed, it is important to consider the importance of reality over its “mirror image.” According to Argentinian filmmakers Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, for bourgeois cinema, “the image of reality is more important than reality itself” as it can have the adverse function of normalizing or even disguising that reality.[3] Whereas some opinions expressed against the film demonstrate an interest in the function of cinema as something that affects their reality, some of the writings in favor of the film have tended to focus on how it functions on the screen.

What critics missed--this point on the effectiveness of the film as a means for inspiring social change--online viewers picked up on. Some interlocutors on social media, for example, who asked, “do we really need to use vulgar words and pornography to make [a] social change?” echoed similar questions and statements heard in loud conversations in Casaoui cafés. In its essence, this question raises the issue of accessibility and how vulgar words and pornographic scenes can make the film inaccessible to a large part of Moroccan society. Other comments made toward the film were also reminiscent of Alea’s The Viewers Dialectic: “The most socially productive show surely cannot be one which limits itself to being a more or less precise reflection of reality just as reality offers itself in its immediacy. That would be no more than a duplication of the image we already have of reality, a redundancy.”

The point here is not to say that Realism is entirely inappropriate for or completely misunderstood in the Moroccan context. In fact we can cite a plethora of realist Moroccan films that have been accessible and to varying extents, effective-- from Alyam Alyam (1978) to L’Orchestre des Aveugles (2015). Rather, the point is to raise questions about in which situations is it effective for a film to try to imitate reality as closely as possible, what aspects of reality should be left out to ensure that a film is not detrimental to people who live within the reality being depicted, and when should allusions or abstract depictions be made.

The Colonial Context of the Cinema in Morocco

Here, it is useful to return to the idea that Much Loved-- whether it is truly Realist or not, whether it is socially effective or not-- is a “historically situated utterance.” Although a multitude of important political, economic, religious, linguistic and cultural factors affect Moroccans, all of which have a significant impact on the way they understand cinematic representations of the real, we cannot make sense of the “revolt” against Much Loved without historically contextualizing it. Since film and photography were both introduced to Morocco during the colonial era (as Shohat and Stam point out, cinema itself was born at the “giddy height of imperialism”), for purposes of brevity, this article will only focus on the historical factors that impacted Moroccan filmmaking since that period. The intention here is not to downplay the importance of other factors which precede the colonial era, nor is it to claim that historic factors are the most essential or relevant. It is rather to demonstrate that there is some continuity of colonial discourse in Moroccan cinema that may explain (in conjunction with other factors which I am incapable of fully addressing here) some of the hostility toward image-makers.

Out of the articles, critiques, and reviews that some Moroccan critics published in defense of the film, several evoked literary works that defied taboos in Moroccan history in order to make the point that Moroccan society has regressed and become less tolerant. Binebine, for example, compares Much Loved to Moroccan literary classics like Mohammed Choukri’s For Bread Alone. Yet, images and words are not equivalent. Ignoring the particular histories of how these two artistic mediums have functioned, in addition to their varying accessibility (almost half the population is illiterate) to the average Moroccan, this argument is oblivious to the relationship Moroccans have to them.

North Africans have often owned their words (especially spoken words that are accessible to all) and have a long history of using them to break "taboos," from Abu Nawas’ poetry to Cheikha Rimitti’s lyrics. Yet images--particularly “realist” images in photography and film--have historically functioned as a means to promote and justify colonialism. Jean Rouch points out that the 1934 Laval Decree, which France implemented in its African colonies in order to regulate cinema, “served as a pretext to deny young Africans…the right to film their own countries.”[4] In Morocco specifically, the additional dahirs (royal decrees) of 9 December 1940; 14 August 1941; and 18 April 1942 effectively put cinema under strict French control and censorship.[5] It was in this spirit that the Centre Cinematographique Marocain (CCM) was founded in 1944. Representing the Moroccan through the visual was an activity afforded only to the colonist in whose interest it was to portray the colonized in a way that benefited colonialism. Claiming to portray reality, Orientalist photographers like Marcelin Flandrin, painters like Delacroix, or filmmakers like David Butler cultivated a distorted and often dehumanized image of Moroccans. Many of these images, whether they were “ethnographic” or “artistic,” were then exhibited in the West to justify colonialism’s violent domination and exploitation of other peoples.[6] It was these colonial cinematographic and photographic activities that initially fomented suspicion of realistic-looking images that had up until then, been almost non-existent in Moroccan culture.

Today in a North African and West African (“Françafrique”) neo-colonial context, we can witness--in one form or another--indirect French control over cinema, including Moroccan cinema. At this point, it should be made clear that I do not believe that the entire body of films Moroccans produced has been influenced by or controlled by French institutions. Nor do I believe that all films that French institutions funded did not try to subvert French cultural aid to convey ideas that contradicted the neo-colonialist intentions of programs like the CAI (Consortium Audiovisuel International), ADEAC (Association pour le développement des échanges artistiques et culturels), the Bureau du Cinéma at the French Ministry of Cooperation, and Fonds Sud Cinéma. We can for example, cite Farida Belyazid’s Une Porte sur le Ciel (1988) as an example of the subversion of French funds, as she portrays a character that rejects French identity and embraces a Sufi Muslim identity as a means of reaching feminine emancipation. However, we must recognize that a significant portion of Moroccan filmmakers who have received French aid tend to fall along a Western liberal vision of Moroccan society--a trend that has been increasing after the explosion of neoliberal programs in the late 1990’s.

Nabil Ayouch entered the Moroccan cinema scene during the birth of neoliberal policy in Morocco. The credit rolls on his films make it clear that Ayouch receives funding from France or Belgium (from both public donors like the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Fonds Sud, and private donors like Canal+). French funding for African films is not a type of benevolence. As Manthia Diawara recounts, following the independence of many African colonies, France embarked on a policy with the French Ministry of Cooperation (now a part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), starting in 1961, which supported filmmakers in “Francophonie” in order to maintain French neo-colonial domination over Africa.[7] Diawara explains that there are two ways of identifying neocolonialism in French aid for African film: assimilation and monopolization. Assimilation, he writes, “is based on the premise of selecting a few Africans at the top and giving them the same privileges as French men and women. Directing films is one such privilege.” Monopolization, on the other hand, “conditions the directors to conform their scripts to acceptable French standards. It is in this sense that controversial and anticolonialist scripts such as La Noire de… are rejected.” While adored by French critics, a majority of the Moroccan Arabic-speaking public despises Much Loved, confirming the idea that the film is intended to serve a Western or Westernized audience and not the Moroccan public as a whole. It is no wonder then that the film has been screened at least eleven times in France within the first week of its showing at the Quinzaine des Realisateurs and months before it was intended for release in Morocco.

Much Loved as an Intersection Between Colonial and Sexist Discourse 

Catering to the West, Much Loved can function as a continuation of colonialist/imperialist discourse, defined by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam as “the linguistic and ideological apparatus that justifies, contemporaneously or even retroactively colonial/imperial practices.” In this case, the discourse is specific to women, women’s bodies, and the European Orientalist conception of the Muslim world as being more oppressive of women. In Women and Gender in Islam, Laila Ahmad describes how British patriarchal structures of governance deployed Western feminist discourse in colonial Egypt. These observations can also be applied to French colonialist discourses vis-à-vis the Maghreb. She writes, while they  “devised theories to contest the claims of feminism, and derided and rejected the ideas of feminism” in Europe, they simultaneously “captured the language of feminism and redirected it, in the service of colonialism, toward Other men and the cultures of Other men” in the colonies.[8]

Under a patriarchal-colonial system, the colonizer could at once speak of the need to liberate the Maghrebi woman from the Maghrebi man while photographing her nude, as a sexual object for colonial masculinist desires (desires that were often violently expressed in the rape of native women by colonizing armies). Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin, for example, like other colonial photographers and filmmakers, sometimes depicted Moroccan women as virgins--a common trope in colonial imagery denoting both native women and native lands as untouched objects to be penetrated--or as prostitutes who could be bought and sold, just like the land and its resources.[9] These images were directly used to attract French men to join the occupation forces in the Maghreb. Like its colonial predecessor, the male-dominated filmmaking apparatus in Morocco can deploy feminist rhetoric in a way that functions to the benefit of both imperialism and patriarchy. Thus, like Flandrin, Ayouch depicts the prostitutes in Much Loved as constantly ready to be penetrated, conjuring a male audience to collectively participate in this penetration as they consume his voyeuristic images, while simultaneously inviting a Western audience to penetrate the native land in order to continue to “civilize” Muslims (in this case about women’s rights).  

[Trailer for the film Much Loved.]

Indeed, it is enough to see the extracts and poster to understand how it can function in this way. From the extracts to the movie poster, one sees a consistent theme throughout reflecting the filmmakers’ position on this issue. A movie poster with a half-naked woman invitingly sucking on her finger is not inviting an audience to come understand how she was put in a position that led her to become a prostitute, but inviting a male audience to indulge in the very type of imagery that tends to fuel, not alleviate, sexual violence. This should come as no surprise, considering Nabil Ayouch’s other films. In Ali Zaoua (2000), there are only two minor female roles and they are both the object of masculinist desires. One role is that of a prostitute mother, the second of a young teenager whom a boy desires. In The Horses of God (2012), the only female roles are minor and the most significant of those characters are mothers, prostitutes, or both a prostitute and a mother at the same time. If we were, as some writers ask us, to understand Nabil Ayouch’s films as a “true” reflection of reality, we would come to the conclusion that Moroccan women are either would-be prostitutes, prostitutes, prostitute-mothers, or naive uneducated mothers.

Thus, Ayouch’s films serve to disempower the Moroccan woman while making European spectators feel better about their privileged and “enlightened” positions. While misogyny exists in both Europe and the former colonies, a misogynist colonial discourse still continues to permeate some Moroccan films. This is particularly the case after 2000, among the new generation of filmmakers like Ayouch, Nourredine Lakhmari, and to some extent, Faouzi Bensaidi. Like their colonial predecessors, these films instill the idea that only “Other men” in the “uncivilized” former colonies are truly oppressive of women, and therefore it is a part of the European civilizing mission to teach the colonized what gender relations should look like. But the colonial civilizing mission is neither benign nor gentle; its objective is not to educate and assist, but rather, “with a kind of perverted logic,” writes Fanon, “it turns its attention to the past of the colonized people and distorts it, disfigures it, and destroys it.”[10] Ultimately, it is a means to justify violence and exploitation. The mission to provide the native with a “real” culture has long been a disguise for violent imperial penetration, from the “white man’s burden” that set out to civilize Native American peoples but was in fact a genocidal process, to Operation Iraqi Freedom which set out to instill “democracy” but left at least half a million Iraqis dead. 

However, many Moroccans reject Western paternalism. In Between Feminism and Islam, Zakia Salime has effectively shown the decline of west-leaning feminist organizations (often funded by Western institutions) in Morocco. Instead, Moroccan women increasingly look to Islam and Moroccan traditions for a route to their emancipation.[11] Just as they reject Western feminism, many Moroccans reject Western depictions of women in cinema. Thus, they refuse Nabil Ayouch’s objectification of Moroccan women on the screen. This does not mean Moroccans do not objectify women in other ways, but rather that they are rejecting a specifically western (and additional) mode of oppressing them: the presentation of women through various forms of media as sexual objects to be consumed.

To conclude, Much Loved is a film that operated not within a vacuum but within a historic, social, political, and economic context, where almost half of the people are illiterate. Thus, we must delve deeper and we must contextualize the complex public discourse against the film, which ranges from explicitly feminist rejections of its portrayal of women, to misogynist comments towards the actresses, to insults (and even death threats) towards the filmmaker, in order to bring out its underlying meanings. Those who loudly expressed their anger towards the film cannot be dismissed as being incapable of understanding cinema, their beliefs can be of great value to Moroccan filmmakers looking to understand their audience. Their discontent with what they label pornographic content in the name of Realism can provide insight for those who seek to reach a wide viewership without necessarily having to resort to populist self-censorship. But the debate around Much Loved is not just useful for Moroccan cinéastes but can also offer filmmakers and critics in other parts of the Middle East and North Africa with an understanding of how a variety of women-- from “laïcard” to Islamist women-- perceive films that address women’s issues. It is important to note that males published most of the writings in the press in favor of the film. Having little access to the media, women primarily expressed themselves through informal channels. Perhaps in this case, hidden discourses expressed informally can have more value than formally expressed discourse in the press.


[1] Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism. 1994.

[2] Alea, Tomas G. The Viewer`s Dialectic. 1984.

[3] Getino, Octavio and Fernando Solanas. Towards a Third Cinema. 1969.

[4] Diawara, Manthia. African Cinema. 1992.

[5] Carter, Sandra G. What Moroccan Cinema?. 2009

[6] Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism. 1994.

[7] Diawara, Manthia. African Cinema. 1992.

[8] Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam. 1992.

[9] Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism. 1994.

[10] Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961

[11] Salime, Zakia. Between Feminism and Islam. 2011