| Summary: | For fifteen years, many Moroccan women writers have been breaking the silence on the persistent taboo of feminine virginity in a traditional patriarchal society. At a time when the demands for certificates of virginity and surgical operations of hymen repairs appear to be growing and considering the lack of sociological surveys about sexual practices in Morocco, they help to highlight traditional gendered socialization and the violent forms, either physical or symbolical, of repression on feminine sexuality in Muslim-Arab cultures based on masculine hegemony. In a country where Islam, religion of the State, is both doctrine and organization, culture and history, they participate more widely to deconstruct and challenge gender relations and project the debate in the heart of the Moroccan contemporary public sphere. Based on the novels (most of them semi-autobiographical) of some of these authors, as well as unpublished interviews, this paper aims to instruct the strategies of resistance and transgression of traditional gendered roles that these authors – and their characters – implement (sometimes with ambivalence and using orientalist and/or gendered stereotypes) speaking publicly on this topic related to intimacy.
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