Work on the Export Industry in Tanger (Morocco) from the Biography of Women: An Intersectional Analysis

The narratives of the women who live in border spaces are different, and we will focus on precisely such diversity. Various institutional discourses (academic, political or from interventionists), considering females to be a particularly weak group, submissive and subjected to men’s dictates by their religion and lacking even will, have denied women capability of initiating a plan for their own lives. But we—which examine the experiences of working women in the export industry at Morocco’s northern border—break with that belief, avoiding considering women as a single subject, or a passive one, waiting to be defined or saved by some discourse. We defend the view that women are part of the conversation in which knowledge is constructed where various forms of social stratification are interrelated with women’s lives. It remains true, that a large majority of women are in a situation of greater economic exploitation, we opened the focus to analyze the situation of these and other women to identify the plurality of life situations. However, we recognize that most is in a subordinate position. The subject of this research (female workers in the export industry needs to stop being interpreted in universalized terms and start being thought about from “life experience,” giving way to a diverse and plural subject crossed by multiple axes of social differentiation. Through the telling of their experiences we can combine the analysis of the power structures with the answers of the social actors. The position in the household together with socioeconomic status and the phenomenon of migration place the women in a power-relationship structure conditioned by the export industry in a border framed by symbolic spaces different. We research the symbolic spaces across her narratives and her biographies.