The Undigitized Life is not Worth Living: The Feminization of Celebrity Culture, Women’s New Visibilities and Social Transformation in Morocco

Abstract

Our central concern in this article is to engage the rise of a feminized celebrity culture in Morocco and how it partakes to the reconfiguration of women’s roles and identities in a globalised, hyper-mediatized, consumerist Moroccan society. I shall argue that celebrity culture, notwithstanding the criticisms it might incur, is a crucial window on the emergence of new forms of gender relations and identity politics, an activism that I term as “digitized, grassroot feminism”, occupying (digital) public space and debate in Morocco. Thus, to what extent the emergence of a digitized celebrity culture can be a transgressive form of embodied performance that unsettles patriarchal dichotomies of male/female, public/private, visible/invisible?