Sex, race and power: colonial and interracial sexuality in the French Empire in Morocco, 1912-1956

Phipps, C

Thesis

Sex, race and power: colonial and interracial sexuality in the French Empire in Morocco, 1912-1956

Abstract:: This thesis examines Morocco under French rule (1912-1956) through experiences of gender, sexuality and race. It argues that colonial power was experienced intimately on a large scale through the body and through emotions. This regulation of sexuality extended from sex work into consensual relationships and through attempts to intervene into emotions and sexual desire to police racial boundaries and the limits of whiteness. This thesis outlines how French colonial authorities attempted to regulate sexuality and gender in Morocco in five chapters. The first chapter shows the exploitative sex work system introduced by French health authorities in Morocco that trapped women in brothels to protect the health of European men and women. The second chapter offers a case study of how the French military trafficked 211 Moroccan women to France to work in military brothels in 1947 to prevent interracial sexuality after brothels had been banned in France, comparing this case study to French women who moved to North Africa to sell sex in the same period and moral panics about the “white slave trade”. The third chapter examines letters from European women to their Moroccan lovers, which were used as proof that these women were “dangerous to public security” and should be expelled from Morocco for threatening racial hierarchies. The fourth chapter compares these relationships with “desert romance” novels and films from the 1920s onwards to argue that European women sought to recreate elements of fictional relationships with Moroccan men and that French authorities heavily censored films in Morocco to attempt to regulate the space of sexual fantasy. The fifth chapter looks at queerness, arguing that colonial understandings that sex between men was “traditional” to Moroccan society meant that French authorities avoided intervening when European men bought sex exploitatively from Moroccan boys, but did police gender roles and binaries.

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APA Style

Phipps, C. (2023). Sex, race and power: colonial and interracial sexuality in the French Empire in Morocco, 1912-1956 [PhD thesis]. University of Oxford.

MLA Style

Phipps, C. Sex, Race and Power: Colonial and Interracial Sexuality in the French Empire in Morocco, 1912-1956. University of Oxford, 2023.

Chicago Style

Phipps, C. 2023. “Sex, Race and Power: Colonial and Interracial Sexuality in the French Empire in Morocco, 1912-1956.” PhD thesis, University of Oxford.
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