To browse Academia. In Moroccan media, the prostitute is gradually becoming a cultural icon. This article analyses from a comparative perspective its appearance in two Moroccan films, Casablanca by Night Mostafa Darkaoui, and Much Loved Nabyl Ayouch, These two films portray prostitution in a very different way. Whereas in the first film the figure of the prostitute corresponds to the hegemonic moralistic idea that the general public have about prostitution in Morocco, in the second one the representation of this figure is built on an understanding drawn from the experience of prostitutes.
The main objective of this paper is to define prevalent themes such as crime, deviance, immorality, poverty, disease and violence, among others, associated with prostitution in Morocco and mobilised in the media. The aim is also to analyse how these themes unfold differently in these two featured films and why they gave rise to a violent social controversy for the second. Much Loved, on the contrary, adopts a realistic perspective.
The higher the level of realism and modern representation of prostitution, the higher the social controversy and polarization. This article analyzes and offers a first database about the representation of the sexual and erotic markets of the Moroccan filmography, focusing on female figures: their sociodemographic characterization, the roles they play, and the liminal nature of the represented transactional sex practices. The sample is based on the analysis of 51 characters of 30 films produced between and The most common profile are women who practice paid prostitution, between 15 and 25 years old, mostly single and without family responsibilities, in urban contexts.
Discussion and Conclusions. The presence of characters belonging to the sexual and erotic markets is a constant in Moroccan cinema. Poverty is not always considered as a trigger; prostitution is also linked to the notions of sexual liberalization and access to spaces of freedom. Valerie Orlando. Since the dawn of the new millennium and the ascendance of Mohamed VI to the throne, this narrative often exaggerates the improvement in recent years of women's actual sociocultural, political and economic enfranchisement in Moroccan society.
The documentary by Nadir Bouhmouch challenges the positivism of the government's affirmation that it has ameliorated the lives of all women in Morocco. Equally important, the feature-length fiction film, Much Loved by Nabil Ayouch, serves to set the record straight on Violence Against Women VAW in a country where patriarchal tradition still takes precedence over women's overall societal enfranchisement.
