This paper forms part of a research project into contemporary Moroccan women’s magazines published in French. In this paper, I will explore how issues of space, performativity and identification are encoded in both the text and also in the visual images inscribing the gendered female identity in Citadine and Femmes du Maroc. The paper will focus on a 6-month study of the magazines published between September 2003 and March 2004.

It is an accepted fact that gender is not a stable concept, but is historically, geographically and spatially contingent. The body is also central to any discussion of the gendered feminine identity but, as Judith Butler has noted, the body is also a site of performance: ‘one is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one's body and, indeed, one does one's body differently from one's contemporaries and from one's predecessors and successors as well’ (‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’ p.404).). The connection between space and gender has also been the subject of much recent theoretical debate and, for Doreen Massey, ‘the intersections and mutual influences of “geography” and “gender” are deep and multifarious’. (Space, Place and Gender, p.177). Finally the competing and conflictual nature of identificatory practices is an everyday feature of this era of globalisation in which subjects are increasingly governed by the need to negotiate multiple allegiances. All of these aspects are, I suggest, central features of the French language women’s magazine in Morocco.

Using theories by Judith Butler and Michel Foucault amongst others, I will examine the extent to which Citadine and Femmes du Maroc inscribe the gendered female identity as a self-policing or docile site of performance. I will assess the various performance modes as they appear in the magazines and determine how far these are predicated on appearance, be this bodily shape or adornment. I will also assess the extent to which this identity is spatially contingent and whether it derives from the classic binary division between masculine and feminine space. Finally, I will analyse the identificatory patterns within these magazines and examine the extent to which they promote a rhetoric of allegiance to uniquely Moroccan values, or whether they, in fact, blur identificatory patterns through their adherence to the dominant Western European discourse about femininity promoted in magazines such as Elle and Marie Claire.