Dr Abdelmjid Kettioui

‘Religion is for God and Orgasm is For All:’ The Intersectional and Neoliberal Politics of Sexual Activism in the Moroccan Online

The MENA uprisings of 2011 spawned new forms of youth digital activism including the struggle for sexual freedoms. This project researches Moroccan youth autoethnographies of ‘sexual transition’ and ‘sexual explosion’ represented in the transgression of Islamic norms of sexuality through everyday liberal practices (Dialmy 2017). Sexuality in Morocco is policed through official politics, enduring colonial laws, political Islam’s cultural Salafism and ‘citizen authoritarianism’ (Sari Hanafi 2019). Working at the interstices of ontology, language and non/religion, this project aims to develop an intersectional analysis of the Moroccan online neoliberal politics of sexual activism. This project is based on a rich archive of interviews, opinion pieces, memoirs, jokes, memes, personal anecdotes by amateur Darija (Moroccan Arabic) writers shaped by the February 20 Movement’s revolutionary zeitgeist.