Submissive housewives, unfaithful spouses, dysfunctional marriages and violence: the portrayal of gender roles and marriage in Moroccan jokes

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines Moroccan marital discourse as portrayed in popular culture, specifically jokes that circulate orally and online. Our analysis focuses on fifty jokes related to husbands, wives, and marriage. We employed content analysis for the entire dataset and critical discourse analysis (CDA) using Van Dijk's ‘socio-cognitive’ method for a subset of jokes. The study reveals prevalent stereotypes and societal views on husbands and wives, with a special emphasis on the role of women in Moroccan marriages. These views represent shared ideologies, influencing how individuals in society think, speak, act, and interact. The humour reflects marital conflicts, infidelity, and misogyny as commonplace. Several jokes normalise violence and animosity toward wives. The selected jokes predominantly depict women as passive, insecure, nagging, and reliant on their husbands, who are the primary breadwinners. Women’s contributions to the family are typically limited to motherhood and cooking, and their concerns are shown to be trivial. Negative portrayals of wives, a prevalence of jokes in which females are engaged in infidelity, and reinforcement of traditional gender roles demonstrates a societal concern with regulating the female body and maintaining patriarchy.