Department or Program

Anthropology

Abstract

Guides de montagne are Moroccan mountain guides who have trained and received accreditation to lead hiking groups throughout Morocco's mountain ranges and natural spaces. Fewer than one percent of these mountain guides have been women. While most scholarship discusses Moroccan women's place in private, indoor, and domestic spaces, the femmes guides de montagne challenge long-held paradigms of Moroccan cultural and gendered spaces. Based on fieldwork conducted from April to July 2015 and December 2015 to January 2016 near Morocco's Atlas Mountains, this thesis examines the experiences of five women who work as guides de montagne. As I study their experiences at a previously all-male guide school; their interactions with tourists, coworkers, and women who live in mountain valleys; and their negotiation of familial and professional obligations, I adopt a feminist geographic approach that is attentive to the fluidity of the construction and meaning of gendered spaces. With a theoretically-informed awareness that women experience gendered spatiality in different ways depending on a given cultural context, I analyze what the work of femmes guides de montagne reveals about the range of gendered spaces in Morocco.

Level of Access

Open Access

First Advisor

Danforth, Loring

Date of Graduation

Spring 5-2016

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Number of Pages

97

Components of Thesis

1 pdf file

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