Texting romance: mobile phones, intimacy and gendered moralities in Central Morocco

Over the last decade, the mobile phone has become an integral part of a subterranean ‘youth culture’ of romance in urban Central Morocco. By expanding the opportunities of male–female interaction, the mobile phone enables young women to explore the possibilities of emotional and physical intimacy beyond conventional rules of courtship. The desire for premarital romance, though, collides and interweaves with conventional gendered practices and moralities, as well as with the new religious sensibilities that have emerged with the Islamic revival. Tracing the ways Zahra and Yasmin, two unmarried women in their early 20s, mediate dynamics of flirting, seduction and jealousy via the mobile phone, the author shows how they affirm their respectability through and not in spite of their intimate mediated practices. Far from being only a powerful ‘mediator’ between intimate desires, social expectations and public morality, the mobile phone reveals itself as integral to the ways Zahra and Yasmin reflect on, and act in, their intimate and moral worlds. The author hopes to contribute to ‘gendering’ anthropological debates on ‘everyday Islam’ by showing the nuanced ways in which young women in Central Morocco use the mobile phone to shape their intimate lives, navigating competing femininities and gendered moralities.