The Tragedy of Progress: Rethinking the Genealogies of Feminism in Post-colonial Morocco

Part of the CNES Social Science Series

When Moroccan leftist feminists narrate their life stories and talk about formative influences in their lives, many recall the influence of a traditional and pious father figure who was just and egalitarian, and who inspired their commitment to and struggle for gender equality. If this positive invocation of an enabling tradition is noteworthy for how consistently it recurs in the life stories of a cross-section of Moroccan leftist feminists, it is equally notable for how dramatically it disappears and is displaced by a notion of tradition as obstacle to women’s emancipation and progress. In this paper, I juxtapose invocations of the “traditional, pious but egalitarian” father figure with that of “the failed and disappointing leftist husband who claims to be modern but is in fact traditional.” In doing so, my aim is to denaturalize the feminist repudiation and problematization of tradition; explore the relationship between salvaging modernity and disavowing tradition; emphasize the demands of modern, progressive subjectivity; and rethink the teleologies of feminist historiography. I argue that the tragedy of leftist feminist subjectivity lies in the fact that it is predicated on severing feminist progress from the very tradition that makes it possible in the first place; and that this constitutive disavowal comes in the way of a more generous ethos of intergenerational and intersubjective engagement. This paper is based on field research among founding members of the feminist movement in Morocco whose activism emerged out of their immersion in and subsequent disenchantment with the gender politics of the Moroccan left in the 1980s. It seeks to contribute to a non-teleological reading of postcolonial feminist thought and politics, and to the anthropology of secular and progressive subjectivity.


Nadia Guessous is Assistant Professor of Feminist and Gender Studies at Colorado College. She received her PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial and transnational feminism; religion and secularism; progressive politics; modern subjectivity; affect and viscerality; North Africa, the Middle East and Islam. Her current book project describes the sense of anxiety, exhaustion, and disorientation that prevails among older secular-leftist feminists in the wake of the Islamic Revival in contemporary Morocco. She has published articles and reviews in Confluences Méditerranée, The Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Review of Middle East Studies, American Anthropologist, and Jadaliyya. She is also the author of a study on women, gender and political violence during the years of lead in postcolonial Morocco, which was commissioned by the Moroccan Equity and Reconciliation Commission in 2005.

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Duration: 56:21