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Lecture by Meriem El Haitami (Professor for Gender Studies, Ibn Tofail University, Kénitra, Morocco)
Women and the Re-casting of the Spiritual in Morocco
11.12.2023, 6-8 pm
Location: MuVi-Raum (S81, NW 2)
Hybrid Event! For online participation, kindly register at britta.frede@uni-bayreuth.de!
This lecture traces the emergence and contours of newly gained spaces for women in the fields of new/self-spiritualities and wellbeing culture in Morocco, evoking themes of empowerment, agency and self-determination. By providing a nuanced empirical portrait of emergent spiritual trajectories, this lecture revisits the notion of empowerment, in relation to self-fashioning, the potential for collective action, and modes of meaning-making. It seeks to delve into the reasons why practices within these domains continue to captivate numerous women, surpassing the appeal of feminism, and argue that while such spaces can carve sites of sisterhood, agency and a post-patriarchal cultivation of feminine values and qualities, they also raise concerns about gender essentialism, neoliberal entanglements, and the erasure of socio-political and systemic issues.