Gender and politics in the journalistic and literary work of a scandalous 'class defector': Sanaa Elaji (Morocco) ; Genre et politique dans le travail journalistique et littéraire d'une 'transfuge de classe' scandaleuse' : Sanaa Elaji (Maroc)

Abstract

International audience ; This article is devoted to the analysis of the socio-biographical trajectory of the Moroccan journalist and writer Sanaa Elaji. Born in 1977 in Casablanca, from an illiterate working class background, with a higher education degree, the young woman leads an independent and "emancipated" single life, and lives alone in the Moroccan economic capital at the time of the survey. Multi-positional in the Moroccan media and intellectual field, she has been a journalist in the print media: a former columnist in two French-language magazines (the women's monthly Citadine and TelQuel, the most widely read general information weekly magazine in Morocco) and in an Arabic-language daily, Assahra Al Maghribya, she then worked until 2011 for the weekly Nichane, created in September 2006, the equivalent of TelQuel in Moroccan classical and dialectal Arabic.Sanaa Elaji also published her first sulphurous autofictional novel in dialectal Arabic in 2003, entitled Majnounatou Youssou (Argana Editions), which received considerable media attention. Evoking the sexual relations of two young sisters before or outside marriage, the story places the theme of the relationship to the body and sexuality and, more broadly, that of gender relations in contemporary patriarchal Moroccan society at the heart of the reflection.Politically committed, multiplying transgressive universalist feminist positions through her writings, literary or journalistic, the interviews she regularly gives in the press or on her blog, accumulating trophies outside the literary field (she thus appears in 2006 in the "ranking" list compiled by TelQuel among "the 50 who will make Morocco tomorrow", is a member of the Young Leaders Centre of Morocco.), S. Elaji, in search of recognition, is at the intersection of several fields and networks. She presents an atypical and "in the making" trajectory in the Moroccan media and intellectual fields. However, all of S. Elaji's objectively subversive positions, in that they constitute a double ...