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Cosmopolitan Desire: Transcultural Dialogues and Antiterrorism in Morocco (Alterations)

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Written by anthropology instructor Stephen William Foster, Cosmopolitan Desire: Transcultural Dialogues and Antiterrorism in Morocco is a timely close-up look at the interaction of Western and Muslim cultures among the people of Morocco, as fueled by the modern era of globalization. Drawn from the author's many travels to Morocco, and numerous interviews with Moroccans home and abroad, Cosmopolitan Desire examines how urban, secularized Muslims form their identities, how they present themselves to non-Muslim Westerners, modern intercultural problems set amid the backdrop of history, broad psychological and political forces affecting Morocco's complex society, and much more, including cultural aspects pertaining to sexuality. "I wondered if Moroccan men compartmentalized their sexuality just as they compartmentalized 'their' women and regarded sex simply as lust, furtive pleasure, rather than an idiom for expressing affection or articulating relationships. Their machismo ensured that dominance and submission were constant themes between them, as between themselves and women or themselves and foreigners. Their homophobia, distributed differently across the social terrain than in America, was structured by these themes; rather than proscribing sex between men, the proscription was against the submissive, passive, male, an interesting parallel with their misogyny. The sexual object of male desire, whether male or female, was both a site of male pleasure and of male pollution and opprobrium. That ambivalence, I think, fed the play of desire and the homosocial game as well." An intriguing cross-cultural perspective.