«Natives» womens on stirrups: hygienic discourse and violence through photography in colonial Morocco during the 1930’s

di Christelle Taraud
in Memoria e Ricerca n.s. 20 (2005), p. 43

This article focus on a specific corpus on prostitution, published in a photographical book on french medicin in Morocco during the 1930’s. In the same time, this serie of images, which is studied, concerns the regulation rules in the colonial context, the control and the survey of the prostitutes group and also the repressive aspect which is support by a hygienic discourse and a racial segregation. The violence of the images cames from the iconographical uses of naked women during the gynecological visit and the trivialization of those pictures. In this way, the photograph becomes one actor in the apologetic construction of the colonial medicine and contributes to the construction of “natives” women’s degrading images. Those corpus, compared to writing archives, help the study of the iconographical form of masculin and colonial domination. The practice of photography could be considerated as one of the means which might support the medical, moralist and racist discourse as one of the center of colonial ideology.