MOROCCAN WOMEN EMBROIDERERS: TECHNICAL AND ETHICAL RECONFIGURATIONS

Abstract

Historically, embroidery demonstrated a Moroccan woman’s worth as potential wife and homemaker. In recent decades it has come to serve as a widespread income-generating activity with the potential to upset normative notions of Moroccan womanhood even while it maintains a residual affiliation with proper feminine activity. The transitional statuses of Moroccan womanhood, on the one hand, and embroidery work and its objects, on the other, are interdependent. Both are linked to the intensified circulation of embroidered objects in markets throughout the twentieth century and into the present, and to women’s increased participation in a formalized labor market. The marketization of women’s labor and its products necessarily entails remaking producers, their work practices, and their orientation towards “work.” Thus, ongoing status transformations of Moroccan embroidery and embroiderers give insight into neoliberal reconfigurations of gender and work, and ambivalent recodings of their values today.