Esa puta llamada Tanger, that Whore Called Tangier: Tropes and Practices of Tangerine Prostitution in Hispanophone Memoir and Fiction

The control and representation of sexualities were powerful tools in the construction of colonial orders. Though Edward Said noted the centrality of the erotic to the devaluation and submission of the Orient as part of its feminisation, few scholars have explored the historicity of this process in particular colonial contexts. This paper reads Spanish colonialism in Northern Morocco through representations of prostitution and whoredom across the cultural production of different social actors, with particular attention to the peripheral and ephemeral Orientalisms of popular practice: postcards, journalism, massified travel writing and pulp fiction. With Spanish soldiers and male tourists expecting access to spaces of entertainment that included commercial sex, and women actively travelling from Metropolitan Spain and across North Africa to earn cash as a prostitutional proletariat, the practice of sex work was increasingly visible in Maghrebi urban space. I argue that Spanish colonialism in Morocco developed not only through official policy in dialogue with or in contrast to French administration, but through the management of subaltern Metropolitan and Maghrebi Spanish mobilities integrating the Spanish Protectorate into the broader region, in excess of the colonial state. Spanish women staffing brothels across North Africa embodied material limits to the modernist Spanish colonial project. Complicating and effacing the boundary between coloniser and colonised, they afford new light on the pacific penetration and brotherly colonialism (hermandad hispano-marroquí) core tropes of Spanish state building in Morocco, noted by historians and political scientists.