Abstract
This chapter offers an analysis of an online campaign targeting gay, bisexual, and queer men in Morocco in which young women create fake profiles on Grindr and PlanetRomeo to expose or “out” local men presumed to be gay. The screenshots at the center of this outing campaign are presented as evidence of criminal activity, moral deviance, and shameful queer desire. The chapter discusses how images and texts shared on Grindr and PlanetRomeo are invested with meaning as transparent indicators of same-sex desire by multiple actors within Moroccan social media networks. It then discusses how queer social media users in Morocco and abroad respond to this outing campaign, seeking to maintain Grindr and PlanetRomeo as “safe spaces” for queer men by promoting strategies of increased skepticism toward other users on these platforms, encouraging temporary abstention from using these apps, and appealing for greater online content moderation. The chapter argues that the design features of location-based gay dating apps like Grindr and PlanetRomeo allow for the possibility of both desirable connection and unwanted exposure for queer men in Morocco, challenging the misconception that these apps function as uncomplicated “safe spaces” for queer intimacy and community building.
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Notes
- 1.
Article 489 of the Moroccan Penal Code, which criminalizes “lewd or unnatural acts with a person of the same sex,” represents a direct inheritance from the penal code of the colonial French Protectorate in Morocco (1912–56). For additional context on the history of the criminalization of same-sex sexuality in Morocco and the Arab world in general, see Hayes (2000), El-Rouayheb (2009), Massad (2007), and Provencher (2017).
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Ale-Ebrahim, B. (2023). Making Visible the Unseen Queer: Gay Dating Apps and Ideologies of Truthmaking in an Outing Campaign in Morocco. In: Skalli, L.H., Eltantawy, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Gender, Media and Communication in the Middle East and North Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11980-4_3
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