Stereotyping Sub-Saharan Female Migrants in Moroccan Print Media

Morocco currently occupies a curious position as both a country of transit and a country of installation for migrants originating from Sub-Saharan countries. While migration was previously dominated by males, the number of female migrants has increased significantly, culminating into the so called “the feminisation of migration». The situation of those migrants has grabbed media attention, especially of newspapers; hundreds of articles and reports have been written in newspapers, criticizing or denouncing the phenomenon. Even though the currently available body research has tended to neglect the linguistic ways in which such media convey meaning along the side of their use of images, little attention has been paid to languagebased media. As such this paper scrutinises: (i) the depiction of Sub-Saharan female migrants in Moroccan print newspapers, and (ii)it considers how reports on ‘black’ African women migrants in Morocco may lead to propagating stereotypical acts and xenophobia towards this category of migrants. With these objectives in mind, this study is based on qualitative data of six news items and reports from three daily printed newspapers, chosen between 2012 and 2014. Relying on Critical Discourse Analysis has demonstrated the misrepresentation of female migrants by Moroccan print media. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY GENDER STUDIES المجلة الدولية للدراسات الجندرية متعددة التخصصات: ميدوسا و الفكر المعاصر, Vol. 3 No. 1 (2022): Gendered Bodies on the Move : Re-understanding Women’s Migratory Experiences