Refusal of Reproduction: Paradoxes of Becoming-Woman in Transnational Moroccan Filmmaking

Abstract

The female body has always had a double function with respect to reproduction. By becoming pregnant and giving birth the female body literally reproduces life. At the same time, metaphorically it is often seen as the safeguard of the nation, the reproduction of national values, tradition, and patriarchal history. However, both these reproductive functions have often worked at the cost of the body of the woman, who disappears in the shadow of her offspring and of history. Since the 1970s both French feminist theory and Anglo-American feminist film theory and practice have begun to reclaim the female body and rewrite history. A young generation of transnational women directors of Maghrebin descent, who live and work between the Maghreb and Europe, now seems to continue this feminist project in their films, albeit with some new dimensions.² In this essay I argue that contemporary concerns with the female body in transnational Moroccan cinema are most productively understood in relation to the Deleuzian concepts of “becoming-woman” and “becoming-minoritarian.” Although initially critically received by feminist philosophers, these concepts in fact relate very well to feminist concerns and provide new and paradoxical ways of understanding postcolonial transnational cinema in relation to the nation, minorities, and the body of women.

We are not going to refuse (…) the unsurpassed pleasures of pregnancy which have actually been always exaggerated or conjured away—or cursed—in the classic texts. For if there’s one thing that’s been repressed here’s just the place to find it: in the taboo of the pregnant woman.

Hélène Cixous, 1976

[The myth of] the sleeping child consists of putting the fetus to sleep, by way of white magic, a child that the mother does not want to be born immediately. This can be because she has too many children and wants to postpone the arrival of the next one. Or because she is a widow or repudiated and not yet remarried. Or because her husband has immigrated to another country and she wants to wait for his return to deliver the child, like in the film. (…) Everybody believes in it.

Yasmine Kassari, 2005¹