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

Contemporary Ethnography

by Deborah Kapchan

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.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1996

Reviews

[Wealhtheow · Rating 2 out of 5]

An analysis of Moroccan women in the early 1990s and the ways in which they interacted with, obeyed, and subverted traditions and patriarchal authority, particularly in the public marketplace of the suq. A fascinating subject, but the writing was maddening. There are sections in which the author describes the current and past of women's actions and expectations in Morocco, and I rejoiced when I found these, because the vast majority of this book was recursive and boring. Each chapter includes a several-page exact transcription of a dialog Kapchan or her research assistants overheard. The rest of the chapter is a sentence-by-sentence analysis of what is being said, alternated with multi-paragraph quotes from the earlier transcription. If I wanted to reread one woman's marketplace negotiations (which are themselves incredibly repetitive), I would flip back two pages. As it is, just believe that I can remember what I read mere minutes ago. Getting through this book was made all the harder by Kapchan's reliance on certain terms, which pop up several times a page:

subaltern
commodification
socially pre-scripted
hybridizing force
female discourse
coercive
embodied/embedded
constructed as antagonistic 'others'
entextualization

and by her purposefully convoluted phrasing, as these randomly chosen phrases will attest to:

fused-form speech employed strategically for pragmatic purposes
counter-hegemonic and transgressive voices of the margins
the reflexivity of their status as commodities (though not always as controlling commodities)
redefine and circumscribe territories of newly sanctioned desire
the gestural and emotional-aesthetic ethos structuring identities of difference
the discursive reconstruction of identity, intertextual fields where competing tropes battle for metonymic dominance or accede to hybrid complexity

Basically, this book was not written to convey information. It was so clearly written to show off Kapchan's ability to write impenetrable sentences using academic buzzwords that I would be shocked if this wasn't her PhD dissertation. Why was this published? And moreover, why on earth would my public library buy this?