The Art of Dismantling Taboos in Zainab Fasiki’s Artistic Activism

Abstract

A few years ago, as I was conducting research for my book on Arab women’s revolutionary art, I learned about Zainab Fasiki, a talented young Moroccan artist who combines art and activism to cultivate awareness on topics related to women’s sexuality, agency, and empowerment among the general public (both in her home country, Morocco, and abroad) and to bring about social change. Back then aparticular artworkofFasiki’s grabbedmyattention: anudesuperheroine taller than the Twin Center towers of Casablanca in Morocco, as she describes her (fig. 1). I realized that this giant Venus figure, with her bright red lipstick and her short black hair, was Fasiki’s avatar, but what was more appealing to me was that this superwoman had a specific mission: to bring safety to the city while ending assaults against women and arresting the attackers. Depicting Fasiki as an iconic woman, resting her hand on the Casablanca skyscraper as a sign of empowerment, the image also brings to mind Kahina, or Dihya Tadmut, the Amazigh warrior queen who united the Maghreb and did her best to protect her country until her death in 703 CE. Instead of censuring her body or covering it tomake it “acceptable” (by dressing the figure or changing her body language), Fasiki was using nudity and social media to normalize and desexualize women’s bodies in art and public spaces. Although Arab comics and graphic novels for adults have only started circulating more widely in the Arab region, political caricatures have been popular there for a long time. The latter have been all the more prevalent due to an inclination toward satire and caricature, even in a region where mocking authority can be dangerous (see Douglas and Malti-Douglas 1994; Al-Mousawi 2015). A new generation of Arab artists emerged at the end of the first decade of the 2000s who were