Flirting diasporically: visits ‘home’ facilitating diasporic encounters and complex communities

ABSTRACT

While generations of Moroccan-origin Europeans have been a focus of policymakers seeking to ‘integrate’ them in their countries of dwelling, less attention has been paid to how visiting ‘home’ in Morocco – a perpetuating practice among Moroccan families living in Europe – contributes to their life course trajectories. The summertime influx of Moroccan-origin families from across the globe creates the possibility to encounter a superdiverse community of Moroccans-from-elsewhere when visiting Morocco, many of whom share experiences of individual and collective ‘integration’ in their countries of dwelling, but diverge in their geographical and linguistic lived categorisations. This paper examines one formative type of integrative event that happens on summer holidays: flirtation. Differences in languages, European regional or national affiliations, or Moroccan ethnic and regional attachments all play roles in facilitating or hindering flirtatious encounters between diasporic Moroccans during the summer holidays. The resulting relationships (or lack thereof) demonstrate how diasporic superdiversity contributes to life course trajectories a process of social ordering and categorisation, simultaneously influencing configurations of diversity across Morocco and Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Interaction
• leisure consumption
• categorisation
• path dependency
• complexity

During my interview with Said, a mid-twenties French man of Moroccan parentage, he explained that he would not possibly marry a Moroccan woman. When I had asked if he would think of marrying a ‘Moroccan’, for me that term meant ‘Moroccan from France’ as much as ‘Moroccan from Morocco’ or anywhere else. In his answer, he had taken my question as categorically ‘Moroccan from Morocco’, then explained how ‘their mentality’ is different than those of us from France. I followed by framing my question specifically about marrying someone of Moroccan origin from France, and he clarified that his wife indeed met that description! They met while on vacation in Morocco – happily so, because they both came from the same Moroccan hometown and from the same ‘ethnic’ origins, but grew up in different regions of France. They would not, he said, have met otherwise.

Said’s interpretation of my question and clarification of his answer offers some insights into layers of superdiversity that are increasingly part of diasporic communities. Inversely with the intensive mixtures created by integration in many migration-receiving contexts (Grzymala-Kazlowska and Phillimore 2017), here the superlative diversity lies in the exponential potential created by dispersion from a single sending country to different migratory destinations. Encounters between diverse diasporic individuals, coming from an ethnonational ‘source’ but based in different places, can lead to a perpetuating relationship like marriage – which itself creates a new layer of superdiverse familiarity between origins, places, and possible future trajectories. The objective of this paper, then, is to turn microanalytical attention to what kinds of superdiverse trajectories can be created in the frivolous-but-consequential activity of flirting, through how encounters with diasporic others may be predicated on diversities, integrations, and group coherence visible through practical social ordering, but invisible in many political or statistical forms of categorical labelling.

For Said, his pathway to his wife is predicated on three dependencies. Firstly, that visiting ‘home’ during summer holidays was a practice and tradition in their families, enabled by close proximity and lack of social, economic, legal, and security barriers to travel. Secondly, that their fathers both emigrated from around the same place, from similarly ‘ethnic’ groups, and ended up in similar but different places (i.e. different parts of France). Finally, that Said and his wife continued in their late adolescence and adulthood to choose to visit ‘home’ as diasporic visitors (DVs), along with and beyond their parents’ ‘return’ to family. While in one interpretation this might be an ordinary example of reproduction of a Moroccan diaspora in France, in another reading it becomes an interactional achievement across various possible social and geographical barriers to their encounter.

Effectively, Said’s pathway to his wife relied upon several layers of mobility and collectivity that rendered these two people into a similar trajectory of belonging, superseding barriers such as their regions of residence in France, and enabling other possible connections like their physical point of familial origin in Morocco. The way superdiversity is configured here points to how markers of similarity and difference become relevant to individuals in encounters, rather than how common labels might be applied to them. While they met, in one sense, because they are ‘Moroccan’, they were only able to meet because they are ‘Moroccans from the same hometown, and also from France’. They become part of an ‘integrated’-yet-mobile group whose lives take place in both Europe and in Morocco – with neither one place nor the other being excisable from how this community is formulated – and potentially reproduced – as superdiverse across ‘normal’ categorisational labels.

The final dependency – the tradition, practice, and diasporic choice among Moroccans from Europe to visit ‘home’ – was the subject of the research discussed here (Wagner 2017). This project investigated how the dynamics of being ‘Moroccan from Europe’ involve negotiating both belonging in Europe and belonging in Morocco, for those who choose to continue the practice of visiting Morocco in their transition to adulthood as ‘Moroccans from outside’ (magharba min el-kharij). The scope of the research, and of this paper, is about empirical and described practices, with an ethnomethodological attention to how ordinary activity structures categorisation and the potential to ‘belong’. The methodological focus is therefore on the social ordering and practical enabling of an activity – in this case, flirting – with discussion of participants’ discourses on that activity limited to only discursive elements that emerged in social interactions. In a symbolic interactionist and ethnomethodological tradition of conversation analysis (Goffman 1971; Stokoe 2012), this project explores membership categorisation practices of Moroccans from Europe, to both describe when, where, and how they formed collectives of belonging at ‘home’, and interrogate how the practical activity of belonging at ‘home’ resonates with their integration in Europe.

Said’s example, then, is a demonstration how the frivolous activity he engages in while on holiday in Morocco resonates for his progression and integration into adult life in Europe. Inasmuch as visits ‘home’ occupy most or all of the summer vacation time allotted for an ordinary working resident of Europe, it is not surprising that this time may be spent like many other holidaymakers, seeking the fun and pleasure of romantic encounters (Rojek 1995). Yet, for DVs, the consequentiality of romance may be qualitatively heavier than for holidaymakers visiting a distant elsewhere, in that they are not necessarily going ‘away’, but going ‘home’. Their ‘summer fling’ may not be a person whom they can leave in the past (Larsen, Urry, and Axhausen 2007), as he or she may be interconnected with networks of friends and family across diasporic communities of Moroccans throughout Europe, and their encounter subjected to the moral codes for appropriate sexual behaviour as configured by their European as well as Moroccan sense of ‘home’. Moreover, these romantic encounters often take place in diasporically connected ‘homes’ where these visitors return year after year, and within the surveillance of others who are themselves either perpetually or perennially located, like Said, in both places. They do not simply occur ‘in diaspora’; they are spatially and temporally specific moments with potential repercussions for the rest of their lives, creating resonances between ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ countries that exceed their bureaucratic oversight.

The central objective of this paper is thus to examine how participants in this research, who were still seeking romance at that time, managed the complex and frivolous activity of flirting. To do so, they must navigate among the many possible potential encounters they might have with the broadly diverse population of Morocco, so that some of them (like Said and his wife) may develop lasting partnerships with previously unknown, similarly diasporic others. Such partnerships indicate how participants practically enact a sense of belonging across the potential (super)diversities of diasporic Morocco. Their navigation of flirting demonstrates how dimensions of sameness and difference are interactionally categorised and categorisable (Stokoe 2012) as relevant to their potential partners – in other words, what combinations of ‘ethnic’, ‘geographical’, or other identities become ‘appropriate’ in a flirtation partner.

Beyond the role-based categorisational elements often discussed in conversation analysis or ethnomethodology, this paper also takes geolocalisable reference points and trajectories as relevant to categorial systemics (Stokoe 2012) in diasporic belonging. It is not enough to simply be physically present in one place together; the ability to recognise signs specific to, and geolocatable in, another (diasporic) place was almost a pre-requisite for the flirtation encounters observed. These reference points are both locative and directional: mobility from Morocco to Europe (as a migrant), then to Morocco (as a visitor) reflects a category-relevant trajectory. This directionality likewise disables some potential encounters in Morocco as much as it enables encounters with preferred potential partners coming from a similarly configured trajectory.

In order to analyse how these configurations of reference points and trajectories were made relevant by participants during their summer holiday flirtations, I will first discuss the parameters for how flirting happens in interaction, on the border between ‘respectful’ romantic contact and ‘harassment’ in heterosexual¹ encounters, contextualised through some cultural and moral specificities implicit to the group under discussion. In line with the ethnomethodological ontology of this research, the focus of this discussion and subsequent analysis is to explore how such interactions are accomplished, exclusive of how participants may interpret them as meaningful or significant beyond their own action in situ. Next, I outline some of the categories of belonging that can become relevant in these interactions, including precedents established by previous research on flirting in mobile circumstances and those noted through ethnography in this project. Finally, I analyse three observed examples of flirtatious encounters, each of which indicates different configurations of trajectories and geolocalised reference points, with different possibilities for ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in creating a romantic partnership across diverse diasporic categories.

Social organisation of flirting: civil inattention and respectability

As an interactional activity, flirtation works in many ways as a violation of civil inattention. Goffman (1971, 209–210) describes how the management of inattention between passers-by on the street involves selective shifting of gazes between men and women, which can in some cases become an indication by a woman of her potential receptiveness to a man’s interest. These interactions may then transform from inattention into a convenient pretence for further contact, like ‘feigning common interest in a store display’ (1971, 210) – a pretence which is ambiguous enough to enable the possibility of continuation, or enable participants to retract without losing face. Yet, Goffman also characterises this kind of street encounter as uncommon among ‘the respectable classes’ (1971), a comment which indicates that, beyond his interactional sequencing of how such meetings might happen, there are implicit moral frameworks to how they should happen among ‘respectable’ people.

A disalignment of ‘respect’ becomes relevant, in this case, in that it contributes to a categorisable ‘mentality’ recognised by participants in flirtation practices between Moroccans from Europe and Moroccans from Morocco. While these intersecting groups might share some perspectives on what makes a romantic connection morally appropriate, they seem to differ in practices for executing ‘respectful’ connections in public space, as opposed to ‘harassment’. This differentiation is part of how diasporic integration in public spaces of a ‘homeland’ takes place, through practices of engagement with certain ‘respectful’ collectivities and concomitant distancing from ‘disrespectful’ others.

In order to analyse how ‘respect’ emerges interactionally in the examples below, this section introduces some aspects to how flirtation is able to happen via socially organised interactional modes for making contact with strangers. I formulate these modes through management of categories relevant to the flirting event as they might unfold over time, or how interactants can move within relatively short encounters from ‘being-unknown-strangers’, to ‘being-familiar-and-similar’, to invoking potential future relationships of more intimate contact. The social organisation of this unfolding requires a mutually understood moral encoding of ‘appropriate’ behaviour – whether as ‘respectable’, as Goffman labelled it, or ‘respectful’ – in order that both participants share in categorically reframing each other as flirtation partners. Lack of appropriate ‘respect’ can turn one party’s flirtation into another party’s harassment, whether on the street or in the workplace (Logan 2015).

Flirting with strangers, as a socially organised activity, often happens in designated locations where at least part of the purpose in being there is to participate in flirtation. The management of ‘appropriate’ spaces and times for encountering potential partners can vary greatly, broadly adhering to locally relevant codes for morality in sexual behaviour. Tavory (2009) collected flirtation instances in a Western context, predominantly occurring in bars, cafes, and other university-based sites of food and drink consumption. In Morocco, Carey (2012, 191) describes how his research participant launched a maelstrom of text message flirtation to random phone numbers over the New Year when a main Moroccan mobile phone provider offered free messaging. Neither of these are necessarily sites where flirtation is the main purpose for presence, but both are sites where, in these contexts (heterosexual), strangers are able to interact with the mutually understood purpose of flirtation.

Yet understanding the significance of co-presence as an invitation for flirtation can be socially difficult. Flirtation is a conversational competence drawing on complex embodied and linguistic resources, and requiring skills of ambiguity, subterfuge, indirectness and morally encoded subtleties of pitch (Carey 2012; Egland, Spitzberg, and Zormeier 1996; Tavory 2009). These competences are more than communicative: they are learned over time and through practice, as a skill of knowing what kinds of approaches might be considered appropriate and correct, the purposes and effects of different responses, and how those work into local social organisation (Osella and Osella 1998). The complexity of this interactional achievement requires mutual understanding of contexts, categories, and ‘appropriateness’ to function as a positive experience of ‘respectful’ flirtation, and not a negative experience of harassment.

This hazy distinction between flirtation and harassment is a broadly recognisable problem, especially for sociological research about sexuality in the workplace (Williams, Patti, and Dellinger 1999). Here, again, context and categorical roles are central to understandings of what is ‘appropriate’ between co-present interactants, especially considering how structures of power might intervene, and can be differently interpreted (Yelvington, Osella, and Osella 1999). Understandings of morally appropriate behaviour seem more often to restrict or hinder women’s roles in heterosexual flirtation rather than men’s, whether in terms of Western middle class ‘respectability’ (Skeggs 1999) or in the practicing of avoidance behaviours of ‘risky’ places (Green and Singleton 2006; Wagner and Peters 2013). More recently, public resistance to verbal street harassment has become visible (Logan 2015), challenging how certain behaviours may be socially organised as ‘acceptable’ or ‘appropriate’. Yet even the sense of harassment is not absolutely universal, and may depend on categorisational roles for the one who is doing the delivery (Fairchild 2010).

In a desire to avoid harassment while seeking flirtation, women manage their presence and accessibility to strangers by choosing to participate in certain contexts and not others. For women who are moving between multiple ‘local’ contexts of home, making these choices can require more time and practice as they learn modes for finding ‘appropriate’, ‘respectful’ romantic modes in different places and different ways that women may want to pitch their romantic familiarity with chosen partners. In her discussion on the ‘heritage flings’ of Greek–Canadian women who visit Greece, Panagakos (2014, 8) describes one participant who had several benign relationships with men she met at a beach or at tourist bars and then one that turned negative with a man in her home village, who ‘offered’ her to his friends. Inversely, one DV in my research in Morocco related a story of her shock and surprise at a man approaching her on the street and asking to speak to her. While she considered that behaviour wildly inappropriate, for many locally resident Moroccans, whispered flirtations as a man passes a woman on the street, or approaching a woman in a public place to ask to speak to her, are considered appropriate and sometimes effective ways to find a partner.

This shocked participant, Panagakos’ participant, and Carey’s participant’s success at meeting a woman through random text messaging all reflect socially organised strategies for where one can meet ‘appropriate’ others and engage in ‘appropriate’ flirtation. Like Goffman’s passers-by on the street, each of these modes requires familiarity with contexts and categories involved to be an effective practitioner and to balance between ‘respectability’ and harassment. While a significant part of this balancing is found in the complex conversational activity of flirtation, an equally if not more significant condition is geolocated co-presence, demonstrating awareness of and willing participation in spaces and times where flirtation is allowed. Clearly, these spaces and times can be differently organised: for Tavory, they are limited to bars, cafes, and places of consumption, while for Carey and for myself in Morocco, they become any public space, including any street or any valid mobile phone number. For individuals who are want to open themselves to flirtation, like Panagakos’ visiting women, there is a learning process to choosing where and when to be present, in order to find the ‘right’ kind of flirtation.

Integrational pathways: diasporic categorial semiotics

Recognising flirtation as a complex conjuncture of geolocally specific practices, contexts, and categorical understandings, this section now turns to interrogate how these elements are relevant to and negotiated by participants in this research. Part of this interrogation involves a contextual description of migration that resulted in these participants being raised in Europe rather than in Morocco and their concomitant practices of return visits. These trajectories of mobility engender categorisations that might become relevant to their search for a romantic partner, some of which can be semiotically recognised by members of this group. Another part of this interrogation relates to the discourse of ‘mentality’ as a division participants described between Moroccans from Morocco and Moroccans from Europe that, for Said at least, makes them unsuitable partners. These pathways intersect in the sites where DVs choose to hang out: sites that are purposefully chosen to keep away from undesirable ‘mentalities’, as much as they also reflect practices and places for ‘hanging out’ that are common to their communities in Europe.

As members of the growing Moroccan-origin community in Europe, participants in this research are among those who choose to travel to Morocco along with about two million other Moroccan Nationals Resident Abroad every summer (Ministère du Tourisme 2012). While this ‘diaspora’ and its ‘returning’ nationals are composed of many multifaceted migration trajectories, one of the strongest waves was the fathers of these participants, who arrived as guest workers in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands from 1963 to 1974 (Chattou 1998; Daoud 2011). These participants were therefore born and/or raised in Europe along with their siblings, cousins, and many other Moroccan passport holders in these countries, and continue to participate in the familial – and communal – ritual of visiting for their holidays.

Yet ‘Moroccan’ is not the only relevant designation for these individuals in their European homes. Migratory dynamics targeting certain minority groups (Lazaar 1987; Ouali 2004), along with family networks that enabled successive migrants, creates some basis for recognising differences of place or group of origin within a ‘Moroccan community’. Furthermore, Moroccan guest worker migration occurred in parallel with guest workers from Turkey, and in parallel with other migration flows from Algeria and Tunisia (Crul and Vermeulen 2003; Tribalat 1995). So, while it is feasible for ‘Moroccan-origin’ to be a unifying category for individuals resident in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, they may also find resonance in being ‘Tarifit’, ‘Tamazight’, ‘Tashelhit’, or ‘Arab’; of being ‘Maghrebi’ as general to North Africa; or of being ‘Muslim’ as a commonality between many guest workers. Any one of these can signify a shared trajectory in migration and diaspora, as a placeholder for shared experiences as a group – a group that in many cases has been unified through stigmatisation (Césari, Moreau, and Schleyer-Lindenmann 2001; Lesthaeghe 2000).

Such configurations of difference and similarity have been discussed elsewhere as a barrier to partnership (often imposed by a parental generation), and contribute to how those partnerships integrate diversity, even within minority communities (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002; Charsley 2013; Wise and Velayutham 2008). In this case, crossing any of the above-mentioned dimensions can be viewed as transgressive of a group boundary. Yet, these transgressions tend to have a mitigating similarity, whether configured through a common ‘Moroccanness’, common ‘Maghrebiness’, or common ‘Muslimness’ that makes partnership feasible. That is, they often share a trajectory of migration, in which their parents (or parents’ parents) left a homeland in search of economic sustenance and mobility, and in which they themselves grew up experiencing similar dynamics of stigmatisation as part of an ‘Other’ Europe. All of these dimensions play a material role in how individuals might imagine the communities – superdiverse, multicultural, or multilingual (Blommaert 2014; Meissner 2015; Wessendorf 2014) – into which they can imagine themselves integrating.

Members of this diasporic, nominally European/Moroccan/Muslim community, then, are able to recognise each other along nuanced categorial lines when they cross paths – in itself an interactional achievement drawing on resources of geolocalisable, visible, embodied semiotics and intimate knowledge about diasporic trajectories. Given the predominance of the summer holiday as a period when many members of this trajectory gather in Morocco, participants in this research have had repeated opportunities, over many years of visits, to learn how to recognise Moroccan-origin peers coming from different European homelands, and to engage in different dynamics of inclusion and exclusion based on categorial memberships within this multifaceted encounter. Above all, this period is a summer ‘holiday’: while many arriving families may distinguish themselves from or relate themselves to one another based on categorial identity variations, they are also relating to each other in a unifying category, as ‘families-going-on-vacation’. This practical purpose is as much a part of what creates a space for encounter as their ‘Moroccanness’ or other ‘ethnic’ categorisations – especially in that this purpose is implicit in many of their daily activities out of the house while in Morocco.

Encountering others: categorial leisure

Choices about where, when, and with whom to ‘go out’ are inextricably integrated with how we imagine ourselves as individuals formulating an integrated collective in concert with and in opposition to others (Bourdieu 1984). While we may choose to consume certain spaces, cultural products, or goods and services because of a sense of independent preference, Bourdieu’s classic study of taste demonstrates how habitus contours and is contoured by class, capital, and other categorial distinctions that are implicit in those choices. More pertinently to the present discussion, Saldanha (2007) evaluates similar dynamics of consumption choice within the nightlife music scene in Goa as machinic geographies of race, in which visible belongings as much as access to capital are interwoven with the spaces and times of collective consumption. Both of these approaches to consumption reflect on processes of integration, in that both access to capital and visible semiotics of belonging become relevant for where, when, and with whom participants in the present study chose to spend time and ‘hang out’ – effectively, choosing with which nuanced categorial subgroups they want to participate. Discussions with participants and ethnographic observation of their daily practices indicate that these choices are partially an effort to ‘stay together’ and enable the chance encounters that might take place with like-minded others and partially serve to contrast from alternate consumption spaces and encounters accessible to them as both ‘Moroccans visiting Morocco’ and as ‘Europeans of Moroccan origin’.

This latter contrast is demonstrated in ways that stigmatised ‘difference’ can become spatial differentiation in nightlife for Muslim minorities in Europe. Research elsewhere has documented how individuals with similar profiles to those under discussion here may experience negative stereotyping and exclusion from leisure spaces based on locally relevant categorisations in their European homes (Schwanen et al. 2012). They may either be physically prevented from entering these spaces or their entrance may be restricted to undesirable times for ‘hanging out’. Alternately, Muslim consumers might feel precluded from participating in such consumption environments because alcohol is the basis for encounter (Valentine, Holloway, and Jayne 2010). This combination of negative, category-marking experiences in Europe renders nightlife in Morocco particularly attractive for DVs, as a place where they will not suffer negative stereotyping as troublemaking minorities and where every consumption location is presumed to be ‘halal’.

The former effort, of choosing to encounter like-minded others, relates to the ‘mentality’ difference cited above. Much like what Saldanha describes as machinic geographies of race, spatialised into viscous collectivities of consuming bodies (2007), DVs were frequently to be found ‘sticking together’ in specific types of consumption spaces during the fieldwork for this project. Those sites, in contrast to other sites that participants named as places they would not want to spend time, keep out those of a different ‘mentality’, in the inverse of how they themselves might be excluded from European consumption spaces.

Basis for analysis: social ordering semiotics

My analysis of this patterning is based on ethnographic observation in the larger research project, and descriptions by participants as an explicit motivation in their choices. Methodologically, I posed questions to participants about their leisure motivations in informal interviews, during ethnographic participant observation with Moroccans from Europe during their summer holiday of 2008. Participants ranged from entire extended families whom I followed between Morocco and Europe to individual cohorts whom I spoke to for a few minutes or hung out with over several days. Participants were informed prior to participation about the scope of the research and their ability to withdraw, and longer-term participants were consulted intermittently on their continued consent on publications of photographs and for comments on ongoing written analyses.

As a non-Moroccan-ancestry female researcher, in my late twenties and circulating in these leisure sites along with research participants of similar age, I accompanied and recorded activities either through fieldnotes or with audio recordings in which they wore microphones during their leisure activities in public. My analysis is thus predicated on face-to-face interactions between participants, subjected to ethnomethodological attention to how encounters sequentially unfold to create social order. Likewise, I use microanalysis of conversation (e.g. conversation analysis) to describe emergent categorial systemics (Stokoe 2012) as made relevant by participants in interaction, to the exclusion of those that might be globally applied by the researcher. Beyond a conversation analytical framework, I also contextualise these observations as emergent social dynamics along the lines of actor-networks, in an attempt to interpret how microbehaviors of belonging assemble into complexities of social life (Callon and Law 2004).

These categorisations and social dynamics become empirical both in the choices that DVs made about where to hang out, and in how they characterised their preferences. During one evening at the cafe described below, where I was ‘hanging out’ with a resident Moroccan friend, I approached two different women who independently explained to me their preference for going to spaces like this one, both framing this as a problem of ‘respect’. Noura, a French-Moroccan in her late twenties, preferred to ‘keep ourselves among ourselves’ because men from Morocco would approach her ‘aggressively’; Nasrine, a Dutch-Moroccan in her early twenties, complained that elsewhere ‘the boys are bad’. Their choice of cafe – in a neighbourhood which I described in my fieldnotes as ‘full of banks and government buildings (plus other nice shops)’ – becomes a categorisational act to be present and hang out, without exposing themselves to as much ‘aggressiveness’ as they might find in alternate, often less ‘chic’ locations. Moreover, in this cafe they might encounter each other, as much as they might encounter other women and men who are likewise from a trajectory between Europe and Morocco. Thus, before describing this café as a ‘DV hangout spot’, I can establish ethnomethodologically what aspects about it made it relevant to participants as the preferred choice over others and eventually how those attributes can produce possibilities for flirtation.

Beyond simply occupying the same consumption space, these DVs are also practicing visible semiotics for recognising each other within their parallel and specific trajectories. These semiotics-in-motion can be compared to how Saldanha (2007, chapter 10) notes that deeply tanned skin becomes a sign of long-term participation in the community of ‘Goa freaks’, incorporating both whiteness as a starting point (i.e. non-Indian-origins) and the time in the Goan sun required to achieve a depth of colour. Rather than simply being a sign of wealth or prestige, tanned skin, combined with certain other signs, comes to indicate a cumulative and multifaceted trajectory of Goan expatriate lifestyle amongst a collective able to recognise its semiotics. Likewise, DVs recognise each other’s fashion choices, hairstyles, veil styles, and other material culture as signifying geolocatable trends that travel along this trajectory between Europe and Morocco. Beyond that, they can also recognise each other by more blatant and purposeful ‘signs’ like the number plate of the car in Figure 1. Seeing that, along with the self-presentation of the man who angled his head and shoulders out the driver’s window to speak with them on the street, the two women I was accompanying could categorise him as a ‘French’ person when they stopped to respond to him, whereas in other circumstances they would, and did, walk purposefully past men talking to them on the street.

Figure 1. Flirtation on the street in Morocco, August 2008.

Some of these signs are more persistent (like the signifying markers of car license plates from Europe), while others are more ephemeral and perpetually in transition (like the fashion that summer for carrying a certain size and shape of ‘man-purse’, which, I was told, was a sign of ‘French guys’). All of them integrate into the complexities of recognising and being recognised within a particular DV habitus, or as collaborating in these machinic geographies of collectivity. These geographies are not simply about being a consumer of a certain type of leisure space but incorporate accumulating and cyclical trajectories between one place and another, where elements of that path-dependent trajectory become materially and semiotically embedded into the presentation of self. That presentation of self is also not limited to one’s body and its visible semiotics alone: it is as much about the choice to be present in certain spaces (and not others) and with whom one might interact while there. The distinctions participants make between themselves as ‘Moroccan’ and other ‘Moroccans’ with a ‘different mentality’ thus become not only categorisations but spatialised practices, where the potential for superdiverse contact across the broad citizenry of diasporic and territorial Morocco is circumscribed through the places where different groups hang out.

Three encounters: flirtation and integration pathways

The three flirtatious encounters – each of them both successful and unsuccessful in their different ways – indicate some of the complex factors involved in how this diasporically linked community of individuals can engage with, and disengage from, one another. In relation to the preceding discussions on the dynamics of flirtation as a social activity in public space and on how the pathways and semiotics of multiple potentially relevant categorisations can come into play in this case, these examples demonstrate how (1) practices of morality, (2) indications of geolocalisable familiarity, and (3) configurations of linguistic capacities all become lines along which romantic alliances can emerge or can fizzle out. Each of these encounters has the potential to create a ‘match’ that cuts across some distance of civil inattention to make two diverse individuals known to each other, but – following the ways participants themselves choose to interact with diverse others – these ‘matches’ are contoured by categorical distinctions limited to the diasporic trajectory of ‘being-Moroccan-from-Europe’ and excluding ‘being-Moroccan-from-Morocco’.

My participating perspective on each encounter was principally through the young women involved: Sanae, Naima, and Najat, ranging in ages from early to late twenties, and each of whom were alternately hanging out with me and with others in their friend circles during the few days I accompanied them on their holidays. While I witnessed many other occasions of flirtatious interactions, with these women and with other participants, these three were of relatively longer duration and were signalled by an actor during or after the interaction as being significant. That is, unlike the frequently repeating, brief, relatively inconsequential flirtations that might happen throughout a day spent hanging out, these three were notably invested with interactional resources, and revisited or discussed in some way in their aftermath, whether as being strategically faulty, hopeful, or disappointing.

Inasmuch as the first two instances of flirting took place in the same water park on the outskirts of a city (see Figure 2), while the last took place in the souq of an old city centre (medina), these examples also involve some sense of monitoring for ‘safe’ flirtation partners. To the extent that the water park is already a ‘controlled’ space of consumption through payment for access, it serves to guarantee a similar ‘mentality’ among its patrons. In contrast, the city centre souq is an ‘uncontrolled’ space, where civil inattention is often used to dispel unwanted flirtations. This comparison of examples demonstrates different methods for being present and inattentive – either in the water park or by not walking away on the street – as they can be used for opening to flirtation.

The first example comes from Sanae, a French-speaking Belgian-Tarifit woman in her late twenties. Her flirtation encounter occurred as we were leaving the water park at the end of the day, after a few hours of afternoon sunbathing. Though we had not spoken to many others inside, while waiting for the shuttle bus to transfer us back to the city centre, she began conversing with another park visitor:

Fieldnote extract 1: Sanae at water park, 7 August 2008

Saw lots of other draguer occasions, including Sanae up close, with Yacine the pompier [firefighter] who started keeping us company while waiting for the navette that never comes.

v. interesting that a lot of his drague was sort of recognition thru kharijness – where in europe are you from, where in Morocco; taza, hoceima and linguistic similarities; local knowledges like roads from one place to another, and things that have been changed recently or not. she admits the problem of not being able to Not be bothered by men, which he takes as possibly a veiled refutation, but she doesn’t mean him. he’s impressed she came to learn arabic … 

to the point of trying to stay with us and not leave with his friends … 

In these fieldnotes, I remarked on how the ‘drague’ (flirting) between Yacine the French firefighter and Sanae built upon their shared ‘kharijness’, or ‘outsiderness’, through local knowledges about their nearby Moroccan hometowns and the geolocalised similarities and commonalities of knowledge it enabled between them. Not only were these related to more perpetual semiotics of these places, like a shared minority language, but also about changes they each would have observed over repeated visits to them. They also managed elements of morality and respect in this conversation, through an open discussion about Sanae being ‘bothered’ by men, which enabled her to categorise Yacine, in contrast, among respectful men. The conversation continued up to the limits of Yacine being pulled away by alternate transportation (with his friends), and concluded with him getting her Moroccan phone number. (To my knowledge, he did not call.)

Beginning from a point at which Sanae and Yacine find themselves being consumers of the same leisure environment, they can already assume each other to be participating a similar habitus of taste, or more pertinently to this context, ‘mentality’. They can then establish themselves as primarily French speakers, through overhearing or initiating conversations. These points of commonality become a foundation for elaborating on other ways that they share this trajectory – despite that, in fact, they come from different hometowns, live in geographically distant places in Europe (southern France, southern Belgium), and do not seem to have networks of friends or family that intersect to enable them to ‘know’ one another. Their common semiotic reference points geolocate them together in this point of intersection at the water park and along their parallel – yet diverse – trajectories of diasporic life. Though this encounter did not culminate, to my knowledge, in anything beyond an exchange of phone numbers, it is an example where the intersection at ‘home’ in Morocco could expand into lives in Europe.

Figure 2. Fieldnote extract: Draguers at water park, 7 August 2008.

Notes: Watched one group of 3 in wave pool, posturing: doing pushups, holding each other’s heads underwater (maybe mid-twenties…) and then trying to chat up French 2 girls sitting chatting in front of them. the girls ignored, he tried maybe 3-4 times to get a name or anything.

The second example from the water park involves Naima, a Flemish-speaking Belgian-Tamazight woman in her early twenties, who I had likewise accompanied to the park for an afternoon. While she had been trying unsuccessfully to get her circle of friends to join her for swimming in this park earlier in the week, when we finally went there after her friends had departed for another town she did not do any swimming. Rather, she sat mostly on our beach towels, watching and occasionally chatting with others near us and passing by, and changing her outfit twice during the few hours we spent there. Whatever facilities might be offered by this park as a leisure site, her primary purpose seemed to see and be seen by other DVs beyond her immediate circle.

Part of this self-presentation in a ‘safe’ environment is likely related to the uniqueness of her diasporic trajectory. Her friends who had recently visited and departed came from more dominant parallel trajectories of Moroccans who migrated from the northern part of the country and settled in Flemish-speaking Belgium or in the Netherlands; Naima’s family had migrated from southern Morocco, meaning that her familial language and Moroccan hometown were far distant from those of her Moroccan-origin friends in Belgium. The relative uniqueness of her trajectory became relevant to the notable attempt at flirtation that happened after we had been sitting for some time:

Fieldnote extract 2: Naima at water park. 9 August 2008

(After lunch) I went straight to [water park] to meet Naima … 

she talks like she doesn’t like the annoying drageurs, but she is nonetheless very very careful about her appearance and tenue:

she wouldn’t take off her shorts, saying her legs are fat (which I find hard to believe – a decidedly ideal figure). she has [features] that make her noticeable from afar. and she is noticed, and she knows that they notice, but she refuses to consider any of them. Sometimes, when they are particularly persistent, she replies in the repartee, but not always. She complains about them, the f*ckers, but I think she enjoys the attention. Constantly checking her phone, both of them!

For example, ‘Fred’ who came up to talk to her:

- Salam, es-tu instable ou c’est l’eau qui ne te conviens pas? [Hello, are you unstable or is it the water you don’t like?]

- quoi? [what?]

- es-tu instable ou c’est l’eau qui ne te conviens pas? [are you unstable, or is it the water you don’t like?]

- (shrug, turn away)

- c’est de l’humour [it’s humor]

- quoi!??! (louder) [what!??!]

- c’est de l’humour l’HUMOUR [it’s humor HUMOR]

-    l’humour? [humor?]

- tu parles francais? kathederi bl arabiya? [you speak French? do you speak Arabic?]

- no non

- desolee, sorry

- bye (go away)

(the version he wrote down was somewhat more polite …)

it seems like la drague always happens in french – no matter who is on either end.

he came back by after she had gone off to deal with her hair to try to get info about her out of me, and we chatted for a while about his travel.

While Fred made a good faith effort to begin a conversation in what he assumed was a shared language (French), that assumption did not hold. Naima replied within her limited comprehension and production of French, but then did not understand when Fred asked her first if she speaks French, then replied no (in French) when he asked if she speaks Arabic. My quick rendering of the sequence of talk after Fred had left (transcribed above from my notecard) marks ways that Naima was indicating her non-verbal non-comprehension, and several different changes of code between them (French, Arabic, and English), which all amounted to inability to communicate. When Fred returned at Naima’s next departure from our spot, he wrote his own version of this conversation, in which he asked her the same two questions about her languages, and then politely excused himself.

Even if they share this ‘respectful’ consumption space, and possibly a diasporic trajectory of common reference points, interacting with each other would take more effort than Naima (at least) seemed to be willing to devote. Yet, while it is not clear if she considers these kind of approaches as ‘harassment’, she does choose to present herself somewhat purposefully for these interactions. Her management of attention and inattention is part of both in her response to Fred (rather than ignoring him completely, she actually replied) and her dodging the flirtations of other men, as noted in the fieldnotes, who act in some way as a source of fodder for complaints. In that sense, neither Fred nor the other approaches she recounted were ‘disrespectful’: though they might have been annoying or persistent, they were not insulting.

Part of how her attention to ‘respectful’ approaches is managed involves very subtle signals, as described by Goffman and by Tavory cited previously, that enable flirtation partners to negotiate a shift from civil inattention to partial possible attention, to determining whether she wants to pursue an engaged conversation. Beyond the language barrier, if Naima had been interested in Fred for other reasons, she might have made more effort towards bridging that communicative gap – her allowing the conversation to take place beyond his opening try may have been giving him an opportunity to find the right language for her. In this sense, the fact that Naima responds to Fred’s conversation invitation at all can be an invitation to continue and part of her way of finding friends or potential romantic interests to ease her summer boredom while finally hanging out – as she had been requesting from me and her friends for several days – in this oasis of diasporic leisure.

That management of attention and inattention becomes crucial to deconstructing the final example, which occurred outside of any controlled or ‘safe’ consumption spaces, but still becomes an encounter between individuals who are part of the collective shared trajectory of DVs from Europe (Figure 2). In this instance, I was accompanying the mid-twenties French-Arab woman Najat, along with her peer cousin Chaima and her older married sister Slama during a shopping excursion in the city centre. The interaction was recorded through a microphone worn by Najat as the main research participant and principal bargainer among the three, for conversational data on marketplace bargaining. Along with several bargaining encounters that day, the recording includes the following appearance of three young men alongside them, of whom only one audibly speaks:

Interaction extract: flirtation on the street

A full audio–visual analysis of this interaction might be more informative about the different ways Najat, Chaima, and Slama were attentive and inattentive to these men, but the audio recorded still provides some potential for analysis, along with some of the embodied orientations reconstructed from fieldnotes. Though there were three women in this group (as well as myself), the draguer seems to be conversationally addressing Najat in particular – posing first the question ‘where are you from’ (line 3) then, when she pauses her speech, following up with a precisely accurate guess of her hometown in France (line 5). In other words, this stranger on the street walks up behind Najat and guesses exactly her hometown.

Her next turn (line 6) is not a response to him directly; at that point, she was still facing the vendor and talking with her sister and Chaima next to her. Rather, she starts talking about him with her companions, then after he changes his guess incorrectly (line 7), she confirms over her shoulder (still not orienting her body to him) that his first guess was correct (line 8). The women then disattend to him – at least in the recorded audio – for nearly a minute and a half while they continue their shopping task with that vendor, before Slama signals readiness to depart (‘let’s go?’, line 9). After this almost two full minutes of inattention, the draguer wishes them a nice holiday (line 12), which then finally receives a direct response from Najat and Chaima (line 13 and 14). He then offers his number – probably to Najat – as she replies by pushing her cousin to talk (turn 16). Her cousin is laughing at this point, and may have said something, though nothing is audible in the recording. Najat makes an excuse that she is with her big sister (Slama) and therefore not talking (turn 18). In this same turn, she pushes her cousin twice to speak for herself. No further turns are audible from the draguer, as they walk away. Once he is out of earshot, Najat addresses her cousin again, asking if in fact she was interested in these guys (turn 21). Her cousin replies negatively (turn 22), and then again with more detail, but inaudibly (turn 24). Extrapolating from Najat’s final comment, telling her cousin she should have spoken to one of the friends, Chaima may have expressed an interest in another member of the group of men.

Like the previously described encounters, this one relies on the shared spatial presence in Morocco as a leisure site, though not necessarily in a delineated ‘safe’ space of consumption. Instead, the delineations of what is recognisably ‘safe’ come, to some extent, from the draguer’s ability to recognise with extreme accuracy whatever semiotics might have marked Najat’s French hometown. The semiotics he was reading are entirely unknown: he may have recognised her accent or some other perceivable marker of that region, or may have specifically recognised her as a person who he had previously seen in France. In any case, even though he approached her on the uncontrolled street, his ability to pinpoint that information earned him a sidelong reply to his initial guess and enabled him to remain there for an extremely long conversational pause (nearly two minutes) with the hope that the flirtation might continue. That this wait was a conversational pause, and not simply the inattention Najat and Chaima might display to completely ignore and refuse flirtatious attention, is indicated by his well-wishing and their reply as they move to take their leave. Their eventual reply indicates their permission to him that he (and his friends) would be worthy of Najat and Chaima’s attention.

Yet, the encounter is still in some ways unsuccessful – no contact information was shared – because of apparently contrasting notions of ‘respect’. While Najat claims to not be able to respond because she was with her sister (though she may have had other potential unstated reasons not to reply), she is simultaneously teaching her cousin how to make these connections if they interest her. Chaima may also be negotiating issues of propriety, both of her choices and tastes in ‘style’ and in her presentation in front of her two cousins. This lack of success, however, is not in any way about the ‘mentality’ of these three men: as indicated by Najat’s final injunction to Chaima, they were all suitable potential flirtation partners, which indicates that the problem here was not a difference in ‘mentality’ or a sense of feeling harassed on the street. Even though this group approached them in a public site, they did so in a ‘respectful’ way that marked how DVs manage to find each other in the crowd of public space and ‘keep ourselves among ourselves’.

These three examples delineate some of the contours of spatial presence, recognition, and categorisation that can enable the response to an initial flirtation to switch from purposeful inattention to permissible interaction. These are all accomplished following some broad social organisation for communicative interaction but are equally about management of spatial, contextual, and moral categorisations. These women make moral categorisations relevant about what sort of man may or may not permissibly approach them (Sanae) or under what circumstances he may do so appropriately (Najat). They engage with the geolocational references that mark them, both in terms of where they are present when this encounter happens (for Sanae and Naima, in the ‘safe’ consumption space of the water park; for Najat, shopping in the medina in the company of her family members), and in how, especially for Sanae and Najat, they share a trajectory with the man who approaches, who can name or recognise similar homespaces in Morocco and in Europe. Naima’s counterposing disconnection from Fred, his failed attempt to identify a geolocalisable, mutually intelligible language between them marks how an effective border might emerge that delineates superdiverse Moroccans-from-Europe along communicative lines rather than other possible categorisations. Given that she did not disattend to him completely, even these communicative borders may be porous – since both of them were present in this ‘safe’ space for interaction with others of a similar ‘mentality’. These three instances thus demonstrate how trajectory is practiced, managed, and delineated through diasporic activity and time spent in Morocco, so that possibilities for encounters with others of similar trajectories abound while delineation between superdiverse diasporic Moroccans and others of a different ‘mentality’ become more sharply, spatially closed.

Conclusions: trajectories of diasporic diversity

As examples of what sorts of potential relationships might develop after a chance meeting during the summer holidays, these observed events from fieldwork with Moroccans from Europe indicate that geolocalisable trajectories become significant in ways that individuals orient to a flirtation partner as a potential match. More so than an imagined community of ‘Moroccans’ that broadly encompasses those living in diaspora and those living in Morocco, appropriate romantic partners are confined to those of a similar ‘mentality’ and communicating in the same language(s), and not necessarily those who come from the same background or grew up in the same European or Moroccan hometown. These trajectories unite diasporic Moroccans intersecting with each other as part of a superdiverse mobile collective, who cross paths in certain locations – like the leisure sites where they spend time during summer holidays in Morocco.

These examples also indicate fluidity to how difference and sameness can be complexly configured in diasporic face-to-face encounters, facilitated by the accessibility of the ancestral homeland as a site for leisure circulation. These complex configurations raise questions about what ‘integration’ might look like for these diverse partnerships as they settle into European homes, but connect themselves to different geolocatable points in various homelands. They also raise questions to how superdiversities incorporate complex connectivities made through their mobile lives, taking place in Europe and elsewhere.

By choosing certain consumption spaces, DVs orient themselves to a diasporic diversity that occurs in Morocco, but is dependent upon sharing a trajectory to and from Europe. They encounter others with parallel knowledge about Moroccan and European places, linguistic capacities in Moroccan and European languages, and presence in Morocco during the summer holiday. Even if interactants do not share all the same geolocatable reference points, they can be assured that they share a common ‘mentality’ of what constitutes a ‘respectful’ encounter between heterosexual men and women that, for these women, is categorically relevant to being a ‘Moroccan-from-Europe’ in contrast to ‘disrespectful’ men they encounter in public places in Morocco. Their integration – both as visitors in Morocco and as residents (with their romantic partners) in Europe – depends on the multiplicity of places and belongings crossed by these trajectories, yet delimited by ‘respect’. Recognising these complex diasporic trajectories, rather than categorising individuals through other determinate labels like ‘ethnicity’, opens a perspective on how these individuals, as clustered minority communities in different places in Europe, can recognise each other across presumed similarities and differences in a complex, mobile, and evolving collective that adds a different dimension to superdiversity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Lauren B. Wagner http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4778-7408

Notes

1 The scope of these observations is unfortunately limited to hetero-normative sexual activity.