Mercurial Queer: Localized Sexualities in Contemporary Moroccan Cinema

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Abstract Queer Moroccan cinematic subjects tend to leave the Maghreb for the West to fully realize their “gay” sexual subjectivity. By contrast, two recent Moroccan films, Maryam Touzani’s The Blue Caftan (Le Bleu du caftan, 2022) and Nabil Ayouch’s Razzia (2017), insert queerness into localized forms or, more precisely, into localized networks, defined through time and space and in dialogue with Indigenous representational forms. Queer is not suddenly visible or “out,” but rather is shown to have always been present locally, meaning that Western discursive taxonomies are not needed. These two films opens up possibilities for queer Moroccan film to ignore and speak back to Western hegemonic constructs of sexuality.