Gender-based Violence among “Moroccan-Spanish Diaspora Families”

Abstract

Abstract In this study, the core issue that necessitates investigation is the extent to which migration, as a type of movement, manages to reshuffle gender norms and practices by maintaining a more tolerating environment for both men and women. Hence, Najat El Hachmi as a Spanish-Moroccan author, in The Last Patriarch, represents the social and cultural restrictions imposed on gender in Morocco and Spain. These social and cultural restrictions are not only based on a physical violence targeting both sexes in general and women in particular but rather symbolic violence is also incarnated. In this regard, based on gender and diaspora approaches, I argue that El Hachmi's The Last Patriarch constructs a platform in which it debates the generally assumed idea that reduces migration into a more liberating phenomenon that revises gender norms. Migration is not a totally liberating movement that provides a space in which gender-based violence is annihilated for Moroccan-Spanish subjects but rather it also imposes travelling gender restrictions and racism. In this novel, violence is more symbolic than physical, which shows the heaviness that is embedded in this type of violence and which obstructs the empowerment that can be a result of moving from one place to another.