Crafting lives, negotiating ambivalence: love, friendship and intimacy amongst young women in a Moroccan boomtown

This thesis endeavours to disentangle the multifaceted gendered imaginaries and the discourses on love that shape the “politics of intimacy” in a Moroccan boomtown situated at the foot of the Middle Atlas Mountains, Central Morocco. Specifically, it explores the ways in which young women – the main focus of this thesis – craft their subjectivity and affective words in a context where demands of ethical reform interweave with mundane desires, and where globalised imaginative horizons clash with material constraints. This work is the result of 14 months of ethnographic research carried out in Morocco between 2008 and 2010, during which I shared my everyday life with girls and women of different generations, levels of education and social backgrounds. By focusing on young women’s affective worlds and their ethical reform, my aim in this thesis is to demonstrate that the study of intimate relationships (romantic love, family ties and friendship) can provide an important contribution to the understanding of the dynamics of subjectivation and agency. By dwelling on the complexities and ambivalences that these processes entail, this thesis intends to show that intimate relationships are also critical terrains where the broader social dynamics characterising Morocco nowadays can be investigated, because it is precisely within them that tensions and contradictions become particularly intense.