Moroccan Minor Sexualities: Coloniality, Subalternization and Minor Psychoanalysis

Abstract

ABSTRACT Sexuality is not a universal notion, nor one that has always existed, but, in Foucauldian terms, the result of a “deployment of sexuality”. The Western deployment of sexuality, the overproduction of knowledge on sexuality in the line of which Foucault defines psychoanalysis, and the Christian descendance that Foucault attributes to it through confession and discourse on the self, are the elements addressed in this article, and confronted to sexual and racial configurations that remain outside the deployment of sexuality. The author tackles the question of Moroccan “homosexualities”, and discusses their irreducible subalternization. The question raised is how a Western discourse on sexuality, embedded within the deployment of sexuality, can address non-Western sex and gender issues, but also how psychoanalysis, the direct result of the deployment of sexuality according to Foucault, may listen to subjects whose subjectivation is not defined as a subjection to this deployment. After focusing on recent sociological studies about Moroccan “homosexuality”, the author points out the subalternization process that threatens these approaches, and then puts into perspective subalternity and the subject of the unconscious, in order to ponder over the possibility of a hybridized, minor psychoanalysis.