Refusal of Reproduction: Paradoxes of Becoming-Woman in Transnational Moroccan Filmmaking

Abstract

The female body has always had a double function with respect to reproduction. By becoming pregnant and giving birth the female body literally reproduces life. At the same time, metaphorically it is often seen as the safeguard of the nation, the reproduction of national values, tradition, and patriarchal history. However, both these reproductive functions have often worked at the cost of the body of the woman, who disappears in the shadow of her offspring and of history. Since the 1970s both French feminist theory and Anglo-American feminist film theory and practice have begun to reclaim the female body and rewrite history. A young generation of transnational women directors of Maghrebin descent, who live and work between the Maghreb and Europe, now seems to continue this feminist project in their films, albeit with some new dimensions. 2 In this essay I argue that contemporary concerns with the female body in transnational Moroccan cinema are most productively understood in relation to the Deleuzian concepts of “becoming-woman” and “becoming-minoritarian.” Although initially critically received by feminist philosophers, these concepts in fact relate very well to feminist concerns and provide new and paradoxical ways of understanding postcolonial transnational cinema in relation to the nation, minorities, and the body of women. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.