Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition

Front Cover
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996 - Business & Economics - 325 pages

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1996

Gender on the Market is a study of Moroccan women's expressive culture and the ways in which it both determines and responds to current transformations in gender roles. Beginning with women's emergence into what has been defined as the most paradigmatic of Moroccan male institutions--the marketplace--the book elucidates how gender and commodity relations are experienced and interpreted in women's aesthetic practices.

Deborah Kapchan compellingly demonstrates that Moroccan women challenge some of the most basic cultural assumptions of their society--especially ones concerning power and authority.

From inside the book

Contents

In the Place of the Market
29
Shtara Competence in Cleverness
50
Words of Possession Possession of Words The Majduba
72
Words About Herbs Feminine Performance of Oratory in the Marketplace
103
Reporting the New Revoicing the Past Marketplace Oratory and the Carnivalesque
138
Gender on the Market
151
Women on the Market The Subversive Bride
153
Catering to the Sexual Market Female Performers Defining the Social Body
181
Terms of Talking Back Womens Discourse on Magic
235
Conclusion Hybridization and the Marketplace
275
Discourse of the Majduba
280
Discourse of the Ashshaba
290
Glossary
297
Bibliography
299
Subject Index
321
Author Index
323

Property in the Other Person MothersinLaw Working Women and Maids
212

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Page 17 - These images of agency are increasingly distortions of a world of merchandising so subtle that the consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where in fact he or she is at best a chooser.
Page 27 - Barthes ironically invites us to imagine someone (a kind of Monsieur Teste in reverse) who abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple discard of that old specter: logical contradiction: who mixes every language, even those said to be incompatible...