Abstract

This dissertation focuses on women’s creative expressions in post-Arab Spring
Morocco as they relate to their continuing struggle for human rights, social justice and gender
equality from 2011 to 2020. Specifically, I examine a number of artistic productions by four
self-identified Moroccan women artists from four distinct artistic disciplines - slam poetry,
theatre, visual arts and rap. I begin by locating women’s creative expressions in relation to
the literature on the creative insurgency of the Arab Spring and women’s creative
disobedience in contemporary Egypt. I pay particular attention to the gender paradox of the
Arab Spring, the rise of political Islam to power and its implications for women’s agency,
creativity and continued activism. This dissertation includes a textual and visual analysis of
the selected women’s artworks, supplemented by insights from the individual interviews I
conducted with the artists. Using bell hooks’s (1989) notion of talking back, which she
defines as a counter-hegemonic discourse that aims to contest and deconstruct structures of
domination, I argue that Moroccan women’s artistic expressions talk back to several social
and political realities that continue to undermine women’s social status today. These
productions emerge from and respond to a specific social and political context in post-
“revolutionary” Morocco (2011-2020), one that is characterized by both a hijacking of the
(political) revolution by the regime as well as the Islamists’ blatant backlash against women’s
rights.
Many scholars have previously argued that the Arab Spring failed precisely because it
did not include a gender-sensitive agenda. Drawing on Badran’s (2016)’s idea of the
continuing (gender and cultural) revolution in post-Arab Spring Egypt, I argue that
Moroccan women’s artistic productions exemplify several aspects of such a continuing
revolution in present-day Morocco. This is evident in the nature of the themes and topics that
women artivists address (i.e., epistemology), along with the way they interpret and make
meaning out of certain social realities that continue to undermine their social status today
(i.e., hermeneutics). The dissertation concludes by suggesting the continuing existence of a “transnational (feminist) revolution” in the North African region today where women
artivists are foregrounding gender as the focal point of both political analysis and praxis to
carry on the spirit of the 2011 revolutions.