Maroon 315of Casablanca on their way to or from somewhere, but one does not
find many women leisuring in the public sphere. Certain public spaces,
such as hair salons and restaurants, are endorsed as long as women are
behind screens or darkened windows. Women are certainly found walk-
ing through the streets, but stopping is not an option. For example, while
it is usual to see any number of men along pedestrian routes who have
stopped to smoke a cigarette or converse with friends, the same cannot
be said of women. While women can be seen streaming in and out of the
schools, businesses, shops and government buildings adjacent to the Parc
de la Ligue Arabe, for instance, it is for the most part only men who stop
to linger in the sprawling park itself.^37
n a context where types of public spaces are limited and those that I
exist are subject to gendered boundaries of participation, emergent sites
of sociability with an alternative logic of access, such as cybercafés, take
on magnified importance. Cybers provide women with unprecedented
equal access to new and autonomous modes of communication. The mas-
culine hegemony of Muslim Casablanca’s public face, so starkly evident
in the dominant traditional cafés, is overridden in the gender dynamics
of cybers, where women represent between 30 and 53 percent of consum-
ers at any given time.^38 It is clear that the customary moral judgment of
women’s presence in cafés is suspended.
ere are, however, limits to this suspension. When night swallows Th
the city shortly before the last call to prayer, segregation is reinforced. By
the late-night hours of 9:30–11 p.m. (11 p.m. being when cybers generally
close), the predominantly male constitution of the traditional cafés is in
full force at cybers as well. The actualization of an egalitarian space during
the day and its disappearance at night shows us in practical terms how
the moral terrain of urban Morocco expands and contracts its normative
textures when threads of the information age are woven into the public.
I suggest that it is the presence of technology, marking cybers as sites of
potential knowledge-building, that enables women to access them with-
out the stigma that comes from accessing sites deemed as solely public
leisure spaces. While females continue to struggle for entry into public
sites of leisure, their presence in institutions of learning is roughly equal
to that of males. A space then that is understood as a site in which one can
acquire additional skills and knowledge becomes open—to a degree—to