ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Nabil Ayouch's film Much Loved (Zin Li Fik) and Laila Lalami's novel Secret Son (2009) denounce the debilitating silence accumulated around the phenomenon of prostitution in Morocco that manipulates women with the threat of shame and defers social responsibility. In scripting violence, these texts indicate that the Moroccan state's attempt to regulate and organize gender within the modern urban space banks on the control and discipline of “the female prostitute” as a postcolonial product of patriarchy. Tragically, the wider infrastructure legitimized by state institutions also maintains the women's precarious position and encourages the unbalanced distribution of power between state and people and between men and women. These women's terrible fate symbolizes the failure of the postcolonial state to recognize its weakness and to help at-risk women to embrace the rights promised them by law. In revealing these women's stories, Ayouch and Lalami denounce the state's complicity in women's prostitution and transform their texts into cultural tools of activism and resistance in the fight for women's equality. In this way, they pay tribute to the revolutionary spirit of one of the earliest feminists in North Africa: al-Kahina.
