AM31 - Anthropologie du corps et de la santé

At the heart of contemporary social mutations, the medicalization of social life and particularly that of the body raises important questions about aesthetic practices like the use of cosmetic surgery among Moroccan women. Its development took place in a context where the medical norm shifted from purely curative to a sustained attention to ill-being. In addition to the medico-technological revolution, the media over-investment promoted the maintenance of the form, the beauty and the control of the body as an imperative of well-being.  Cosmetic surgery, as a phenomenon that has a medical dimension, also has a socio-anthropological dimension that deserves to be explored. In this sense, the aim of this qualitative research is to reveal the socio-anthropological and therapeutic stakes of the practice of cosmetic surgery in Morocco.  In order to understand the motivations of Moroccan women's recourse to cosmetic surgery, 33 semi-directive interviews were conducted in a clinic of reconstructive and cosmetic surgery in Rabat in (April - May 2021). Indeed, these women's stories (aged from 20 to 59 years) are all related to an experience specific to each woman. Beyond an aspiration to body beauty and social and professional desirability, these bodily transformations contribute more and more to a medicalization of social life, implicitly leading to a social self-control rather than an appropriation of the body. The socio-anthropological reading of cosmetic surgery is based on a very contemporary reflection on identity, but which goes back symbolically to a rite of passage of a metamorphosed body. Indeed, the analysis of the interviews highlighted this ritual and initiatory dimension of cosmetic surgery, which occurs in periods of transition in the life of any respondent, while allowing, traditionally, to change their status: transition from adolescence to adulthood, after maternity, from adulthood to old age.

 

 

The recent law of 2021 in France that penalizes doctors who perform virginity certificates (Fortier 2021, Hatem-Gantzer 2020) raises questions about the very status of this certificate in France, where we conducted our research, but also, in a broader perspective and comparative approach, in the Maghreb and the Middle East. On the one hand, the examination of Muslim legal sources shows that the expression "certificate of virginity" as if it were a necessary condition for the "marriage certificate" has no legal value in Islam. On the other hand, the term "virginity certificate" gives a scientific value to an examination that is less about the hymen itself than about the representations attributed to it.

Yet, the imperative of virginity until marriage remains prevalent in many societies in the small Maghreb (Ben Dridi 2004, 2017; Ben Smail 2012, 2022; El Aji 2018; Ferhati 2007; Karray-Ben Smail 2022; Rahou 2013, 2017) and more broadly in the Middle East among Muslims and non-Muslims alike (Fortier 2022, Tersigni 2016). But today, more than in the past, this imperative is difficult to implement given the evolution of gender relations in the Arab world insofar as it appears hardly incompatible with the new aspirations of young generations to love and sexuality (Fortier, Kreil, Maffi 2018).

Both medical virginity certificates and police virginity tests aim to distinguish between two types of women, the virtuous ones who have retained the integrity of their hymen, and the depraved ones who have lost it. The WHO in 2018 launched a campaign for the "eradication of virginity tests" (Eliminating Virginity Testing), a campaign that seems to be little followed in the countries of the Maghreb and the Middle East and we will analyze why.

 

In Morocco, a Muslim country, the registration of a child in a socially, religiously and legally recognized filiation requires that he or she be born of a union between a married man and woman. A study on access to medically assisted reproduction (MAP) in this country leads us to consider the strategies, fears and adaptations envisaged to have "a child of one's own flesh and blood", according to the expression in Darija. There are ways of making infertility less visible, especially when it affects the man of the couple, a situation hard to accept. The paper discusses the faculty of accommodation with the norm, the debates around the regulation of MPA, but also the experiences of women. I will ask to what extent the medicalization of procreation, and the possible alternative of recourse to MPA, in Morocco, tend to reinforce the link between biological begetting and legitimate filiation.

 

My doctoral project deals with the issue of post-mortem organ transplantation in Israel and Palestine, with a focus on transplants between Palestinian and Israeli individuals. This anthropological research explores how transplants are practiced and considered by Israeli and Palestinian societies, while taking into consideration the different power of subjects to access care and over their own bodies. The research examines the relationship between the religious, ethical and political dimensions of organ transplants and, in particular, how these operations can produce situations of "colonial intimacy", where power relations linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are deployed and embodied. Particular attention is paid to the level of subjectivities and to the links between donor and recipient subjects, especially in cases of transplants between Palestinians and Israelis. Multisite ethnography considers both the physical spaces of transplants, such as the hospitals where they are performed, and the virtual spaces where this phenomenon resonates, such as social networks, by exploring online research approaches.