Race As Index for Other Matters: Gender and the Language of Land Rights in Morocco

In a groundbreaking lecture entitled "Race: The Floating Signifier" Stuart Hall defined race as a signifier that forbears all attempts of fixation around biological differences, religious, or scientific truths. Hall emphasized the fluctuations and permutations that complicate any stabilization of the meaning of race. I build on these insights to explore how the terms, race and racism, have articulated rural women’s quest for land rights in Morocco. I explore these articulations in the Sulaliyyat Movement for land rights, as a grassroots, nationwide mobilization which started in the Gharb region, Nortwest Atlantic, in 2007. In this paper I focus on the case of Mina, a 60-year-old Sulaliyya from the Gharb, and show how she mobilized race in her quest for land rights. Mina articulated her experience about sexism, corruption, and patriarchal oppression, as racism. She did not have a name for these interlocking systems of domination, but she perfectly understood how women as a dispossessed gender were situated at their nexus. She racialized a process that was detached from any proper racial formation. This is what I term ,race as index for other matters. In the Sulaliyyat Movement the term racism indexes this nexus of patriarchal laws, state corruption, and economic exclusion. Race becomes a powerful metaphor that provides gender with political valence while pointing to the discriminations collectively and individually experienced by women as a marginalized gender. In this paper, I focus on the everyday language that the Sulaliyyat use to articulate their struggle for land rights. I look at how the semantic of racism permeates women’s perceptions of their condition as an oppressed gender.