Abstract
In Morocco, motherhood is a central site for enforcing normative expectations of family life and heterosexual reproduction, yet it also acts as a powerful tool for enacting expansive relations of care, protection, and unconditional support. In analyzing the stories of gay men I encountered during ethnographic research in Morocco in 2018 and 2019, I explore how queer Moroccans are reshaping the category of motherhood. How do queer people, especially gay men, live in relation to the category of mother in Morocco? How do queer Moroccan men engage with mothers, mothering, and motherhood as a way to build kinship relations with others? In what ways are queer men in Morocco reclaiming and reshaping normative models of motherhood, including taking on the role of mother themselves, to enact relations of care and support for one another both within and outside the boundaries of heteropatriarchal family structures? I argue that queer Moroccans engage in strategies of queering motherhood and mothering queers to build new models of kinship relations involving mothers and their queer kin, disidentifying with normative models of Moroccan motherhood as a productive means of enacting expansive and supportive family relations.
Author Note: I have no conflicts of interest to disclose. This research was funded by grants from the African Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington. All names referenced in this chapter are pseudonyms, and individuals are composite characters with some minor biographical details modified to preserve the confidentiality of my research participants.
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Ale-Ebrahim, B. (2022). Queering Motherhood and Mothering Queers in Morocco. In: Gilley, B.J., Masullo, G. (eds) Non-Binary Family Configurations: Intersections of Queerness and Homonormativity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05367-2_9
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