Rethinking Protest: Women Farmworkers Shaping Agricultural Spaces in Southern Morocco

In southern Morocco, female farm workers laid off by a French agri-food group have taken to the streets to launch an al-’Ucha - an occupation of the public space. Triggered by the widespread adoption of precarious employment within national and international agri-food companies, these movements react to the isolation of workers and the dwindling capacity for collective mobilisation. Thus, through al-’Ucha, they seek to create an entirely different kind of space conducive to the assertion of rights, the affirmation of a collective voice, the construction of a community, or a new political identity. In this article, I seek to challenge the dominant methodologies of analysing and interpreting streets and everyday spaces from a gendered perspective, moving beyond the notion of a feminised private space and a masculine public one. Instead, I show how rural women working in the Moroccan agricultural sector have challenged the perception of the everyday spaces as a site of protest predominantly associated with a specific body—namely, the organised male presence.