Pathways of Amazigh Feminism in Morocco: Unveiling Patterns of Empowerment, Agency, and Ethnicity Rights

Abstract

This thesis delves into Amazigh feminism as a nascent alternative within the Moroccan feminist landscape, focusing on the interplay between empowerment and agency as part of the ethnic rights framework asserted by Amazigh women, especially in rural settings. This study is based on decolonial and indigenous feminist foundations to challenge the two mainstream Moroccan feminisms, Western/secular and traditional/Islamic, which have a fundamental role in the struggle of Amazigh women in relation to their discrimination, marginalisation and silencing of their experiences and contributions. Undertaking ethnographic research conducted in two regions of southern Morocco; namely, Dra-Tafilalet and Sous Massa, I sought to uncover the particularity of how Amazigh women navigate the intersectionality of their struggles and day-to-day experience. Having employed a mixed-method approach, with both exploratory and empirical research methods, my research helped me reveal how these women manage to assert their agency, engage in grassroot activism, and foster community building through empowerment strategies, despite the persistent challenges that revolve around their daily lives, such as gender inequality, socioeconomic obstacles or cultural and linguistic marginalisation. Accordingly, the results of this thesis advance the urgent need to incorporate the contributions and particularities of Amazigh women in the Moroccan feminist discourse. Ultimately, it advocates for their participation as active agents in their own struggle to mitigate gender inequality and and reassert their preservation of identity, tradition, language and culture. Finally, I hope that the preliminary work initiated by this thesis could encourage more research to be undetaken on these women, particularly, unveiling ways complex tributes of gender, ethnicity and rurality are intertwined in order to better understand the processes of agency and empowerment that indigenous women carry out locally, nationally and beyond.