Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

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Flirting diasporically: visits ‘home’ facilitating

diasporic encounters and complex communities

Lauren B. Wagner

To cite this article: Lauren B. Wagner (2018) Flirting diasporically: visits ‘home’ facilitating
diasporic encounters and complex communities, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44:2,
321-340, DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2017.1341716

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1341716

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JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES, 2018
VOL. 44, NO. 2, 321–340
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1341716

Flirting diasporically: visits ‘home’ facilitating diasporic

encounters and complex communities
Lauren B. Wagner
Department of Technology and Society Studies, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
While generations of Moroccan-origin Europeans have been a focus Interaction; leisure
of policymakers seeking to ‘integrate’ them in their countries of consumption; categorisation;
dwelling, less attention has been paid to how visiting ‘home’ in path dependency; complexity
Morocco – a perpetuating practice among Moroccan families
living in Europe – contributes to their life course trajectories. The
summertime influx of Moroccan-origin families from across the
globe creates the possibility to encounter a superdiverse
community of Moroccans-from-elsewhere when visiting Morocco,
many of whom share experiences of individual and collective
‘integration’ in their countries of dwelling, but diverge in their
geographical and linguistic lived categorisations. This paper
examines one formative type of integrative event that happens on
summer holidays: flirtation. Differences in languages, European
regional or national affiliations, or Moroccan ethnic and regional
attachments all play roles in facilitating or hindering flirtatious
encounters between diasporic Moroccans during the summer
holidays. The resulting relationships (or lack thereof) demonstrate
how diasporic superdiversity contributes to life course trajectories
a process of social ordering and categorisation, simultaneously
influencing configurations of diversity across Morocco and Europe.

During my interview with Said, a mid-twenties French man of Moroccan parentage, he

explained that he would not possibly marry a Moroccan woman. When I had asked if he
would think of marrying a ‘Moroccan’, for me that term meant ‘Moroccan from France’
as much as ‘Moroccan from Morocco’ or anywhere else. In his answer, he had taken my ques-
tion as categorically ‘Moroccan from Morocco’, then explained how ‘their mentality’ is differ-
ent than those of us from France. I followed by framing my question specifically about
marrying someone of Moroccan origin from France, and he clarified that his wife indeed
met that description! They met while on vacation in Morocco – happily so, because they
both came from the same Moroccan hometown and from the same ‘ethnic’ origins, but
grew up in different regions of France. They would not, he said, have met otherwise.
Said’s interpretation of my question and clarification of his answer offers some insights
into layers of superdiversity that are increasingly part of diasporic communities. Inversely

CONTACT Lauren B. Wagner l.wagner@maastrichtuniversity.nl

© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
322 L. B. WAGNER

with the intensive mixtures created by integration in many migration-receiving contexts

(Grzymala-Kazlowska and Phillimore 2017), here the superlative diversity lies in the expo-
nential potential created by dispersion from a single sending country to different
migratory destinations. Encounters between diverse diasporic individuals, coming from
an ethnonational ‘source’ but based in different places, can lead to a perpetuating relation-
ship like marriage – which itself creates a new layer of superdiverse familiarity between
origins, places, and possible future trajectories. The objective of this paper, then, is to
turn microanalytical attention to what kinds of superdiverse trajectories can be created
in the frivolous-but-consequential activity of flirting, through how encounters with dia-
sporic others may be predicated on diversities, integrations, and group coherence
visible through practical social ordering, but invisible in many political or statistical
forms of categorical labelling.
For Said, his pathway to his wife is predicated on three dependencies. Firstly, that visit-
ing ‘home’ during summer holidays was a practice and tradition in their families, enabled
by close proximity and lack of social, economic, legal, and security barriers to travel. Sec-
ondly, that their fathers both emigrated from around the same place, from similarly
‘ethnic’ groups, and ended up in similar but different places (i.e. different parts of
France). Finally, that Said and his wife continued in their late adolescence and adulthood
to choose to visit ‘home’ as diasporic visitors (DVs), along with and beyond their parents’
‘return’ to family. While in one interpretation this might be an ordinary example of repro-
duction of a Moroccan diaspora in France, in another reading it becomes an interactional
achievement across various possible social and geographical barriers to their encounter.
Effectively, Said’s pathway to his wife relied upon several layers of mobility and collec-
tivity that rendered these two people into a similar trajectory of belonging, superseding
barriers such as their regions of residence in France, and enabling other possible connec-
tions like their physical point of familial origin in Morocco. The way superdiversity is con-
figured here points to how markers of similarity and difference become relevant to
individuals in encounters, rather than how common labels might be applied to them.
While they met, in one sense, because they are ‘Moroccan’, they were only able to meet
because they are ‘Moroccans from the same hometown, and also from France’. They
become part of an ‘integrated’-yet-mobile group whose lives take place in both Europe
and in Morocco – with neither one place nor the other being excisable from how this com-
munity is formulated – and potentially reproduced – as superdiverse across ‘normal’ cate-
gorisational labels.
The final dependency – the tradition, practice, and diasporic choice among Moroccans
from Europe to visit ‘home’ – was the subject of the research discussed here (Wagner
2017). This project investigated how the dynamics of being ‘Moroccan from Europe’
involve negotiating both belonging in Europe and belonging in Morocco, for those who
choose to continue the practice of visiting Morocco in their transition to adulthood as
‘Moroccans from outside’ (magharba min el-kharij). The scope of the research, and of
this paper, is about empirical and described practices, with an ethnomethodological atten-
tion to how ordinary activity structures categorisation and the potential to ‘belong’. The
methodological focus is therefore on the social ordering and practical enabling of an
activity – in this case, flirting – with discussion of participants’ discourses on that activity
limited to only discursive elements that emerged in social interactions. In a symbolic inter-
actionist and ethnomethodological tradition of conversation analysis (Goffman 1971;
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 323

Stokoe 2012), this project explores membership categorisation practices of Moroccans

from Europe, to both describe when, where, and how they formed collectives of belonging
at ‘home’, and interrogate how the practical activity of belonging at ‘home’ resonates with
their integration in Europe.
Said’s example, then, is a demonstration how the frivolous activity he engages in while
on holiday in Morocco resonates for his progression and integration into adult life in
Europe. Inasmuch as visits ‘home’ occupy most or all of the summer vacation time allotted
for an ordinary working resident of Europe, it is not surprising that this time may be spent
like many other holidaymakers, seeking the fun and pleasure of romantic encounters
(Rojek 1995). Yet, for DVs, the consequentiality of romance may be qualitatively
heavier than for holidaymakers visiting a distant elsewhere, in that they are not necessarily
going ‘away’, but going ‘home’. Their ‘summer fling’ may not be a person whom they can
leave in the past (Larsen, Urry, and Axhausen 2007), as he or she may be interconnected
with networks of friends and family across diasporic communities of Moroccans through-
out Europe, and their encounter subjected to the moral codes for appropriate sexual
behaviour as configured by their European as well as Moroccan sense of ‘home’. Moreover,
these romantic encounters often take place in diasporically connected ‘homes’ where these
visitors return year after year, and within the surveillance of others who are themselves
either perpetually or perennially located, like Said, in both places. They do not simply
occur ‘in diaspora’; they are spatially and temporally specific moments with potential
repercussions for the rest of their lives, creating resonances between ‘sending’ and ‘receiv-
ing’ countries that exceed their bureaucratic oversight.
The central objective of this paper is thus to examine how participants in this research,
who were still seeking romance at that time, managed the complex and frivolous activity of
flirting. To do so, they must navigate among the many possible potential encounters they
might have with the broadly diverse population of Morocco, so that some of them (like
Said and his wife) may develop lasting partnerships with previously unknown, similarly
diasporic others. Such partnerships indicate how participants practically enact a sense
of belonging across the potential (super)diversities of diasporic Morocco. Their navigation
of flirting demonstrates how dimensions of sameness and difference are interactionally
categorised and categorisable (Stokoe 2012) as relevant to their potential partners – in
other words, what combinations of ‘ethnic’, ‘geographical’, or other identities become
‘appropriate’ in a flirtation partner.
Beyond the role-based categorisational elements often discussed in conversation analy-
sis or ethnomethodology, this paper also takes geolocalisable reference points and trajec-
tories as relevant to categorial systemics (Stokoe 2012) in diasporic belonging. It is not
enough to simply be physically present in one place together; the ability to recognise
signs specific to, and geolocatable in, another (diasporic) place was almost a pre-requisite
for the flirtation encounters observed. These reference points are both locative and direc-
tional: mobility from Morocco to Europe (as a migrant), then to Morocco (as a visitor)
reflects a category-relevant trajectory. This directionality likewise disables some potential
encounters in Morocco as much as it enables encounters with preferred potential partners
coming from a similarly configured trajectory.
In order to analyse how these configurations of reference points and trajectories were
made relevant by participants during their summer holiday flirtations, I will first discuss
the parameters for how flirting happens in interaction, on the border between ‘respectful’
324 L. B. WAGNER

romantic contact and ‘harassment’ in heterosexual1 encounters, contextualised through

some cultural and moral specificities implicit to the group under discussion. In line with
the ethnomethodological ontology of this research, the focus of this discussion and sub-
sequent analysis is to explore how such interactions are accomplished, exclusive of how par-
ticipants may interpret them as meaningful or significant beyond their own action in situ.
Next, I outline some of the categories of belonging that can become relevant in these inter-
actions, including precedents established by previous research on flirting in mobile circum-
stances and those noted through ethnography in this project. Finally, I analyse three
observed examples of flirtatious encounters, each of which indicates different configurations
of trajectories and geolocalised reference points, with different possibilities for ‘success’ and
‘failure’ in creating a romantic partnership across diverse diasporic categories.

Social organisation of flirting: civil inattention and respectability

As an interactional activity, flirtation works in many ways as a violation of civil inatten-
tion. Goffman (1971, 209–210) describes how the management of inattention between
passers-by on the street involves selective shifting of gazes between men and women,
which can in some cases become an indication by a woman of her potential receptiveness
to a man’s interest. These interactions may then transform from inattention into a con-
venient pretence for further contact, like ‘feigning common interest in a store display’
(1971, 210) – a pretence which is ambiguous enough to enable the possibility of continu-
ation, or enable participants to retract without losing face. Yet, Goffman also characterises
this kind of street encounter as uncommon among ‘the respectable classes’ (1971), a
comment which indicates that, beyond his interactional sequencing of how such meetings
might happen, there are implicit moral frameworks to how they should happen among
‘respectable’ people.
A disalignment of ‘respect’ becomes relevant, in this case, in that it contributes to a cate-
gorisable ‘mentality’ recognised by participants in flirtation practices between Moroccans
from Europe and Moroccans from Morocco. While these intersecting groups might share
some perspectives on what makes a romantic connection morally appropriate, they seem
to differ in practices for executing ‘respectful’ connections in public space, as opposed to
‘harassment’. This differentiation is part of how diasporic integration in public spaces of a
‘homeland’ takes place, through practices of engagement with certain ‘respectful’ collectiv-
ities and concomitant distancing from ‘disrespectful’ others.
In order to analyse how ‘respect’ emerges interactionally in the examples below, this
section introduces some aspects to how flirtation is able to happen via socially organised
interactional modes for making contact with strangers. I formulate these modes through
management of categories relevant to the flirting event as they might unfold over time, or
how interactants can move within relatively short encounters from ‘being-unknown-
strangers’, to ‘being-familiar-and-similar’, to invoking potential future relationships of
more intimate contact. The social organisation of this unfolding requires a mutually
understood moral encoding of ‘appropriate’ behaviour – whether as ‘respectable’, as
Goffman labelled it, or ‘respectful’ – in order that both participants share in categorically
reframing each other as flirtation partners. Lack of appropriate ‘respect’ can turn one
party’s flirtation into another party’s harassment, whether on the street or in the work-
place (Logan 2015).
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 325

Flirting with strangers, as a socially organised activity, often happens in designated

locations where at least part of the purpose in being there is to participate in flirtation.
The management of ‘appropriate’ spaces and times for encountering potential partners
can vary greatly, broadly adhering to locally relevant codes for morality in sexual behav-
iour. Tavory (2009) collected flirtation instances in a Western context, predominantly
occurring in bars, cafes, and other university-based sites of food and drink consumption.
In Morocco, Carey (2012, 191) describes how his research participant launched a mael-
strom of text message flirtation to random phone numbers over the New Year when a
main Moroccan mobile phone provider offered free messaging. Neither of these are
necessarily sites where flirtation is the main purpose for presence, but both are sites
where, in these contexts (heterosexual), strangers are able to interact with the mutually
understood purpose of flirtation.
Yet understanding the significance of co-presence as an invitation for flirtation can be
socially difficult. Flirtation is a conversational competence drawing on complex embodied
and linguistic resources, and requiring skills of ambiguity, subterfuge, indirectness and
morally encoded subtleties of pitch (Carey 2012; Egland, Spitzberg, and Zormeier 1996;
Tavory 2009). These competences are more than communicative: they are learned over
time and through practice, as a skill of knowing what kinds of approaches might be con-
sidered appropriate and correct, the purposes and effects of different responses, and how
those work into local social organisation (Osella and Osella 1998). The complexity of this
interactional achievement requires mutual understanding of contexts, categories, and
‘appropriateness’ to function as a positive experience of ‘respectful’ flirtation, and not a
negative experience of harassment.
This hazy distinction between flirtation and harassment is a broadly recognisable
problem, especially for sociological research about sexuality in the workplace (Williams,
Patti, and Dellinger 1999). Here, again, context and categorical roles are central to
understandings of what is ‘appropriate’ between co-present interactants, especially con-
sidering how structures of power might intervene, and can be differently interpreted
(Yelvington, Osella, and Osella 1999). Understandings of morally appropriate behaviour
seem more often to restrict or hinder women’s roles in heterosexual flirtation rather than
men’s, whether in terms of Western middle class ‘respectability’ (Skeggs 1999) or in the
practicing of avoidance behaviours of ‘risky’ places (Green and Singleton 2006; Wagner
and Peters 2013). More recently, public resistance to verbal street harassment has
become visible (Logan 2015), challenging how certain behaviours may be socially organ-
ised as ‘acceptable’ or ‘appropriate’. Yet even the sense of harassment is not absolutely
universal, and may depend on categorisational roles for the one who is doing the delivery
(Fairchild 2010).
In a desire to avoid harassment while seeking flirtation, women manage their presence
and accessibility to strangers by choosing to participate in certain contexts and not others.
For women who are moving between multiple ‘local’ contexts of home, making these
choices can require more time and practice as they learn modes for finding ‘appropriate’,
‘respectful’ romantic modes in different places and different ways that women may want to
pitch their romantic familiarity with chosen partners. In her discussion on the ‘heritage
flings’ of Greek–Canadian women who visit Greece, Panagakos (2014, 8) describes one
participant who had several benign relationships with men she met at a beach or at
tourist bars and then one that turned negative with a man in her home village, who
326 L. B. WAGNER

‘offered’ her to his friends. Inversely, one DV in my research in Morocco related a story of
her shock and surprise at a man approaching her on the street and asking to speak to her.
While she considered that behaviour wildly inappropriate, for many locally resident Mor-
occans, whispered flirtations as a man passes a woman on the street, or approaching a
woman in a public place to ask to speak to her, are considered appropriate and sometimes
effective ways to find a partner.
This shocked participant, Panagakos’ participant, and Carey’s participant’s success
at meeting a woman through random text messaging all reflect socially organised strat-
egies for where one can meet ‘appropriate’ others and engage in ‘appropriate’ flirtation.
Like Goffman’s passers-by on the street, each of these modes requires familiarity with
contexts and categories involved to be an effective practitioner and to balance between
‘respectability’ and harassment. While a significant part of this balancing is found in
the complex conversational activity of flirtation, an equally if not more significant con-
dition is geolocated co-presence, demonstrating awareness of and willing participation
in spaces and times where flirtation is allowed. Clearly, these spaces and times can be
differently organised: for Tavory, they are limited to bars, cafes, and places of con-
sumption, while for Carey and for myself in Morocco, they become any public
space, including any street or any valid mobile phone number. For individuals who
are want to open themselves to flirtation, like Panagakos’ visiting women, there is a
learning process to choosing where and when to be present, in order to find the
‘right’ kind of flirtation.

Integrational pathways: diasporic categorial semiotics

Recognising flirtation as a complex conjuncture of geolocally specific practices, contexts,
and categorical understandings, this section now turns to interrogate how these elements
are relevant to and negotiated by participants in this research. Part of this interrogation
involves a contextual description of migration that resulted in these participants being
raised in Europe rather than in Morocco and their concomitant practices of return
visits. These trajectories of mobility engender categorisations that might become rel-
evant to their search for a romantic partner, some of which can be semiotically recog-
nised by members of this group. Another part of this interrogation relates to the
discourse of ‘mentality’ as a division participants described between Moroccans from
Morocco and Moroccans from Europe that, for Said at least, makes them unsuitable
partners. These pathways intersect in the sites where DVs choose to hang out: sites
that are purposefully chosen to keep away from undesirable ‘mentalities’, as much as
they also reflect practices and places for ‘hanging out’ that are common to their commu-
nities in Europe.
As members of the growing Moroccan-origin community in Europe, participants in
this research are among those who choose to travel to Morocco along with about two
million other Moroccan Nationals Resident Abroad every summer (Ministère du Tour-
isme 2012). While this ‘diaspora’ and its ‘returning’ nationals are composed of many mul-
tifaceted migration trajectories, one of the strongest waves was the fathers of these
participants, who arrived as guest workers in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands
from 1963 to 1974 (Chattou 1998; Daoud 2011). These participants were therefore born
and/or raised in Europe along with their siblings, cousins, and many other Moroccan
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 327

passport holders in these countries, and continue to participate in the familial – and com-
munal – ritual of visiting for their holidays.
Yet ‘Moroccan’ is not the only relevant designation for these individuals in their Euro-
pean homes. Migratory dynamics targeting certain minority groups (Lazaar 1987; Ouali
2004), along with family networks that enabled successive migrants, creates some basis
for recognising differences of place or group of origin within a ‘Moroccan community’.
Furthermore, Moroccan guest worker migration occurred in parallel with guest workers
from Turkey, and in parallel with other migration flows from Algeria and Tunisia (Crul
and Vermeulen 2003; Tribalat 1995). So, while it is feasible for ‘Moroccan-origin’ to be
a unifying category for individuals resident in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands,
they may also find resonance in being ‘Tarifit’, ‘Tamazight’, ‘Tashelhit’, or ‘Arab’; of
being ‘Maghrebi’ as general to North Africa; or of being ‘Muslim’ as a commonality
between many guest workers. Any one of these can signify a shared trajectory in migration
and diaspora, as a placeholder for shared experiences as a group – a group that in many
cases has been unified through stigmatisation (Césari, Moreau, and Schleyer-Lindenmann
2001; Lesthaeghe 2000).
Such configurations of difference and similarity have been discussed elsewhere as a
barrier to partnership (often imposed by a parental generation), and contribute to how
those partnerships integrate diversity, even within minority communities (Bryceson and
Vuorela 2002; Charsley 2013; Wise and Velayutham 2008). In this case, crossing any of
the above-mentioned dimensions can be viewed as transgressive of a group boundary.
Yet, these transgressions tend to have a mitigating similarity, whether configured
through a common ‘Moroccanness’, common ‘Maghrebiness’, or common ‘Muslimness’
that makes partnership feasible. That is, they often share a trajectory of migration, in
which their parents (or parents’ parents) left a homeland in search of economic sustenance
and mobility, and in which they themselves grew up experiencing similar dynamics of stig-
matisation as part of an ‘Other’ Europe. All of these dimensions play a material role in how
individuals might imagine the communities – superdiverse, multicultural, or multilingual
(Blommaert 2014; Meissner 2015; Wessendorf 2014) – into which they can imagine them-
selves integrating.
Members of this diasporic, nominally European/Moroccan/Muslim community,
then, are able to recognise each other along nuanced categorial lines when they cross
paths – in itself an interactional achievement drawing on resources of geolocalisable,
visible, embodied semiotics and intimate knowledge about diasporic trajectories.
Given the predominance of the summer holiday as a period when many members of
this trajectory gather in Morocco, participants in this research have had repeated oppor-
tunities, over many years of visits, to learn how to recognise Moroccan-origin peers
coming from different European homelands, and to engage in different dynamics of
inclusion and exclusion based on categorial memberships within this multifaceted
encounter. Above all, this period is a summer ‘holiday’: while many arriving families
may distinguish themselves from or relate themselves to one another based on categorial
identity variations, they are also relating to each other in a unifying category, as
‘families-going-on-vacation’. This practical purpose is as much a part of what creates
a space for encounter as their ‘Moroccanness’ or other ‘ethnic’ categorisations –
especially in that this purpose is implicit in many of their daily activities out of the
house while in Morocco.
328 L. B. WAGNER

Encountering others: categorial leisure

Choices about where, when, and with whom to ‘go out’ are inextricably integrated with
how we imagine ourselves as individuals formulating an integrated collective in concert
with and in opposition to others (Bourdieu 1984). While we may choose to consume
certain spaces, cultural products, or goods and services because of a sense of independent
preference, Bourdieu’s classic study of taste demonstrates how habitus contours and is
contoured by class, capital, and other categorial distinctions that are implicit in those
choices. More pertinently to the present discussion, Saldanha (2007) evaluates similar
dynamics of consumption choice within the nightlife music scene in Goa as machinic geo-
graphies of race, in which visible belongings as much as access to capital are interwoven
with the spaces and times of collective consumption. Both of these approaches to con-
sumption reflect on processes of integration, in that both access to capital and visible
semiotics of belonging become relevant for where, when, and with whom participants
in the present study chose to spend time and ‘hang out’ – effectively, choosing with
which nuanced categorial subgroups they want to participate. Discussions with partici-
pants and ethnographic observation of their daily practices indicate that these choices
are partially an effort to ‘stay together’ and enable the chance encounters that might
take place with like-minded others and partially serve to contrast from alternate consump-
tion spaces and encounters accessible to them as both ‘Moroccans visiting Morocco’ and as
‘Europeans of Moroccan origin’.
This latter contrast is demonstrated in ways that stigmatised ‘difference’ can become
spatial differentiation in nightlife for Muslim minorities in Europe. Research elsewhere
has documented how individuals with similar profiles to those under discussion here
may experience negative stereotyping and exclusion from leisure spaces based on
locally relevant categorisations in their European homes (Schwanen et al. 2012).
They may either be physically prevented from entering these spaces or their entrance
may be restricted to undesirable times for ‘hanging out’. Alternately, Muslim consumers
might feel precluded from participating in such consumption environments because
alcohol is the basis for encounter (Valentine, Holloway, and Jayne 2010). This combi-
nation of negative, category-marking experiences in Europe renders nightlife in
Morocco particularly attractive for DVs, as a place where they will not suffer negative
stereotyping as troublemaking minorities and where every consumption location is pre-
sumed to be ‘halal’.
The former effort, of choosing to encounter like-minded others, relates to the ‘mentality’
difference cited above. Much like what Saldanha describes as machinic geographies of race,
spatialised into viscous collectivities of consuming bodies (2007), DVs were frequently to be
found ‘sticking together’ in specific types of consumption spaces during the fieldwork for
this project. Those sites, in contrast to other sites that participants named as places they
would not want to spend time, keep out those of a different ‘mentality’, in the inverse of
how they themselves might be excluded from European consumption spaces.

Basis for analysis: social ordering semiotics

My analysis of this patterning is based on ethnographic observation in the larger research
project, and descriptions by participants as an explicit motivation in their choices. Meth-
odologically, I posed questions to participants about their leisure motivations in informal
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 329

interviews, during ethnographic participant observation with Moroccans from Europe

during their summer holiday of 2008. Participants ranged from entire extended families
whom I followed between Morocco and Europe to individual cohorts whom I spoke to
for a few minutes or hung out with over several days. Participants were informed prior
to participation about the scope of the research and their ability to withdraw, and
longer-term participants were consulted intermittently on their continued consent on
publications of photographs and for comments on ongoing written analyses.
As a non-Moroccan-ancestry female researcher, in my late twenties and circulating in
these leisure sites along with research participants of similar age, I accompanied and
recorded activities either through fieldnotes or with audio recordings in which they
wore microphones during their leisure activities in public. My analysis is thus predicated
on face-to-face interactions between participants, subjected to ethnomethodological atten-
tion to how encounters sequentially unfold to create social order. Likewise, I use microa-
nalysis of conversation (e.g. conversation analysis) to describe emergent categorial
systemics (Stokoe 2012) as made relevant by participants in interaction, to the exclusion
of those that might be globally applied by the researcher. Beyond a conversation analytical
framework, I also contextualise these observations as emergent social dynamics along the
lines of actor-networks, in an attempt to interpret how microbehaviors of belonging
assemble into complexities of social life (Callon and Law 2004).
These categorisations and social dynamics become empirical both in the choices that
DVs made about where to hang out, and in how they characterised their preferences.
During one evening at the cafe described below, where I was ‘hanging out’ with a resident
Moroccan friend, I approached two different women who independently explained to me
their preference for going to spaces like this one, both framing this as a problem of
‘respect’. Noura, a French-Moroccan in her late twenties, preferred to ‘keep ourselves
among ourselves’ because men from Morocco would approach her ‘aggressively’;
Nasrine, a Dutch-Moroccan in her early twenties, complained that elsewhere ‘the boys
are bad’. Their choice of cafe – in a neighbourhood which I described in my fieldnotes
as ‘full of banks and government buildings (plus other nice shops)’ – becomes a categor-
isational act to be present and hang out, without exposing themselves to as much ‘aggres-
siveness’ as they might find in alternate, often less ‘chic’ locations. Moreover, in this cafe
they might encounter each other, as much as they might encounter other women and men
who are likewise from a trajectory between Europe and Morocco. Thus, before describing
this café as a ‘DV hangout spot’, I can establish ethnomethodologically what aspects about
it made it relevant to participants as the preferred choice over others and eventually how
those attributes can produce possibilities for flirtation.
Beyond simply occupying the same consumption space, these DVs are also practicing
visible semiotics for recognising each other within their parallel and specific trajectories.
These semiotics-in-motion can be compared to how Saldanha (2007, chapter 10) notes
that deeply tanned skin becomes a sign of long-term participation in the community of
‘Goa freaks’, incorporating both whiteness as a starting point (i.e. non-Indian-origins)
and the time in the Goan sun required to achieve a depth of colour. Rather than simply
being a sign of wealth or prestige, tanned skin, combined with certain other signs,
comes to indicate a cumulative and multifaceted trajectory of Goan expatriate lifestyle
amongst a collective able to recognise its semiotics. Likewise, DVs recognise each
other’s fashion choices, hairstyles, veil styles, and other material culture as signifying
330 L. B. WAGNER

geolocatable trends that travel along this trajectory between Europe and Morocco. Beyond
that, they can also recognise each other by more blatant and purposeful ‘signs’ like the
number plate of the car in Figure 1. Seeing that, along with the self-presentation of the
man who angled his head and shoulders out the driver’s window to speak with them
on the street, the two women I was accompanying could categorise him as a ‘French’
person when they stopped to respond to him, whereas in other circumstances they
would, and did, walk purposefully past men talking to them on the street.
Some of these signs are more persistent (like the signifying markers of car license
plates from Europe), while others are more ephemeral and perpetually in transition
(like the fashion that summer for carrying a certain size and shape of ‘man-purse’,
which, I was told, was a sign of ‘French guys’). All of them integrate into the complex-
ities of recognising and being recognised within a particular DV habitus, or as colla-
borating in these machinic geographies of collectivity. These geographies are not
simply about being a consumer of a certain type of leisure space but incorporate
accumulating and cyclical trajectories between one place and another, where elements
of that path-dependent trajectory become materially and semiotically embedded into
the presentation of self. That presentation of self is also not limited to one’s body and
its visible semiotics alone: it is as much about the choice to be present in certain
spaces (and not others) and with whom one might interact while there. The distinc-
tions participants make between themselves as ‘Moroccan’ and other ‘Moroccans’ with
a ‘different mentality’ thus become not only categorisations but spatialised practices,
where the potential for superdiverse contact across the broad citizenry of diasporic

Figure 1. Flirtation on the street in Morocco, August 2008.

 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 331

and territorial Morocco is circumscribed through the places where different groups
hang out.

Three encounters: flirtation and integration pathways

The three flirtatious encounters – each of them both successful and unsuccessful in their
different ways – indicate some of the complex factors involved in how this diasporically
linked community of individuals can engage with, and disengage from, one another. In
relation to the preceding discussions on the dynamics of flirtation as a social activity in
public space and on how the pathways and semiotics of multiple potentially relevant cat-
egorisations can come into play in this case, these examples demonstrate how (1) prac-
tices of morality, (2) indications of geolocalisable familiarity, and (3) configurations of
linguistic capacities all become lines along which romantic alliances can emerge or
can fizzle out. Each of these encounters has the potential to create a ‘match’ that cuts
across some distance of civil inattention to make two diverse individuals known to
each other, but – following the ways participants themselves choose to interact with
diverse others – these ‘matches’ are contoured by categorical distinctions limited to
the diasporic trajectory of ‘being-Moroccan-from-Europe’ and excluding ‘being-Moroc-
can-from-Morocco’.
My participating perspective on each encounter was principally through the young
women involved: Sanae, Naima, and Najat, ranging in ages from early to late twenties,
and each of whom were alternately hanging out with me and with others in their
friend circles during the few days I accompanied them on their holidays. While I wit-
nessed many other occasions of flirtatious interactions, with these women and with
other participants, these three were of relatively longer duration and were signalled by
an actor during or after the interaction as being significant. That is, unlike the frequently
repeating, brief, relatively inconsequential flirtations that might happen throughout a day
spent hanging out, these three were notably invested with interactional resources, and
revisited or discussed in some way in their aftermath, whether as being strategically
faulty, hopeful, or disappointing.
Inasmuch as the first two instances of flirting took place in the same water park on
the outskirts of a city (see Figure 2), while the last took place in the souq of an old city
centre (medina), these examples also involve some sense of monitoring for ‘safe’ flir-
tation partners. To the extent that the water park is already a ‘controlled’ space of con-
sumption through payment for access, it serves to guarantee a similar ‘mentality’
among its patrons. In contrast, the city centre souq is an ‘uncontrolled’ space,
where civil inattention is often used to dispel unwanted flirtations. This comparison
of examples demonstrates different methods for being present and inattentive –
either in the water park or by not walking away on the street – as they can be used
for opening to flirtation.
The first example comes from Sanae, a French-speaking Belgian-Tarifit woman in her
late twenties. Her flirtation encounter occurred as we were leaving the water park at the
end of the day, after a few hours of afternoon sunbathing. Though we had not spoken
to many others inside, while waiting for the shuttle bus to transfer us back to the city
centre, she began conversing with another park visitor:
332 L. B. WAGNER

Fieldnote extract 1: Sanae at water park, 7 August 2008

Saw lots of other draguer occasions, including Sanae up close, with Yacine the pompier [firefighter] who
started keeping us company while waiting for the navette that never comes.
v. interesting that a lot of his drague was sort of recognition thru kharijness – where in europe are you
from, where in Morocco; taza, hoceima and linguistic similarities; local knowledges like roads from one
place to another, and things that have been changed recently or not. she admits the problem of not
being able to Not be bothered by men, which he takes as possibly a veiled refutation, but she doesn’t
mean him. he’s impressed she came to learn arabic …
to the point of trying to stay with us and not leave with his friends …

In these fieldnotes, I remarked on how the ‘drague’ (flirting) between Yacine the French
firefighter and Sanae built upon their shared ‘kharijness’, or ‘outsiderness’, through
local knowledges about their nearby Moroccan hometowns and the geolocalised simi-
larities and commonalities of knowledge it enabled between them. Not only were these
related to more perpetual semiotics of these places, like a shared minority language, but
also about changes they each would have observed over repeated visits to them. They
also managed elements of morality and respect in this conversation, through an open dis-
cussion about Sanae being ‘bothered’ by men, which enabled her to categorise Yacine, in
contrast, among respectful men. The conversation continued up to the limits of Yacine
being pulled away by alternate transportation (with his friends), and concluded with
him getting her Moroccan phone number. (To my knowledge, he did not call.)
Beginning from a point at which Sanae and Yacine find themselves being consumers of
the same leisure environment, they can already assume each other to be participating a
similar habitus of taste, or more pertinently to this context, ‘mentality’. They can then
establish themselves as primarily French speakers, through overhearing or initiating con-
versations. These points of commonality become a foundation for elaborating on other
ways that they share this trajectory – despite that, in fact, they come from different home-
towns, live in geographically distant places in Europe (southern France, southern
Belgium), and do not seem to have networks of friends or family that intersect to
enable them to ‘know’ one another. Their common semiotic reference points geolocate
them together in this point of intersection at the water park and along their parallel –
yet diverse – trajectories of diasporic life. Though this encounter did not culminate, to
my knowledge, in anything beyond an exchange of phone numbers, it is an example
where the intersection at ‘home’ in Morocco could expand into lives in Europe.
The second example from the water park involves Naima, a Flemish-speaking Belgian-
Tamazight woman in her early twenties, who I had likewise accompanied to the park for
an afternoon. While she had been trying unsuccessfully to get her circle of friends to join
her for swimming in this park earlier in the week, when we finally went there after her
friends had departed for another town she did not do any swimming. Rather, she sat
mostly on our beach towels, watching and occasionally chatting with others near us
and passing by, and changing her outfit twice during the few hours we spent there. What-
ever facilities might be offered by this park as a leisure site, her primary purpose seemed to
see and be seen by other DVs beyond her immediate circle.
Part of this self-presentation in a ‘safe’ environment is likely related to the uniqueness of
her diasporic trajectory. Her friends who had recently visited and departed came from
more dominant parallel trajectories of Moroccans who migrated from the northern part
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 333

Figure 2. Fieldnote extract: Draguers at water park, 7 August 2008.

Notes: Watched one group of 3 in wave pool, posturing: doing pushups, holding each other’s heads underwater (maybe
mid-twenties...) and then trying to chat up French 2 girls sitting chatting in front of them. the girls ignored, he tried maybe
3-4 times to get a name or anything.

of the country and settled in Flemish-speaking Belgium or in the Netherlands; Naima’s

family had migrated from southern Morocco, meaning that her familial language and
Moroccan hometown were far distant from those of her Moroccan-origin friends in
Belgium. The relative uniqueness of her trajectory became relevant to the notable
attempt at flirtation that happened after we had been sitting for some time:

Fieldnote extract 2: Naima at water park. 9 August 2008

(After lunch) I went straight to [water park] to meet Naima …

she talks like she doesn’t like the annoying drageurs, but she is nonetheless very very careful about her
appearance and tenue:
she wouldn’t take off her shorts, saying her legs are fat (which I find hard to believe – a decidedly ideal
figure). she has [features] that make her noticeable from afar. and she is noticed, and she knows that they
notice, but she refuses to consider any of them. Sometimes, when they are particularly persistent, she
replies in the repartee, but not always. She complains about them, the f*ckers, but I think she enjoys the
attention. Constantly checking her phone, both of them!
For example, ‘Fred’ who came up to talk to her:
- Salam, es-tu instable ou c’est l’eau qui ne te conviens pas? [Hello, are you unstable or is it the water you
don’t like?]
- quoi? [what?]
- es-tu instable ou c’est l’eau qui ne te conviens pas? [are you unstable, or is it the water you don’t like?]
- (shrug, turn away)
- c’est de l’humour [it’s humor]
334 L. B. WAGNER

- quoi!??! (louder) [what!??!]

- c’est de l’humour l’HUMOUR [it’s humor HUMOR]
- l’humour? [humor?]
- tu parles francais? kathederi bl arabiya? [you speak French? do you speak Arabic?]
- no non
- desolee, sorry
- bye (go away)
(the version he wrote down was somewhat more polite …)
it seems like la drague always happens in french – no matter who is on either end.
he came back by after she had gone off to deal with her hair to try to get info about her out of me, and
we chatted for a while about his travel.

While Fred made a good faith effort to begin a conversation in what he assumed was a shared
language (French), that assumption did not hold. Naima replied within her limited compre-
hension and production of French, but then did not understand when Fred asked her first if
she speaks French, then replied no (in French) when he asked if she speaks Arabic. My quick
rendering of the sequence of talk after Fred had left (transcribed above from my notecard)
marks ways that Naima was indicating her non-verbal non-comprehension, and several
different changes of code between them (French, Arabic, and English), which all amounted
to inability to communicate. When Fred returned at Naima’s next departure from our spot,
he wrote his own version of this conversation, in which he asked her the same two questions
about her languages, and then politely excused himself.
Even if they share this ‘respectful’ consumption space, and possibly a diasporic trajectory of
common reference points, interacting with each other would take more effort than Naima (at
least) seemed to be willing to devote. Yet, while it is not clear if she considers these kind of
approaches as ‘harassment’, she does choose to present herself somewhat purposefully for
these interactions. Her management of attention and inattention is part of both in her response
to Fred (rather than ignoring him completely, she actually replied) and her dodging the flirta-
tions of other men, as noted in the fieldnotes, who act in some way as a source of fodder for
complaints. In that sense, neither Fred nor the other approaches she recounted were ‘disre-
spectful’: though they might have been annoying or persistent, they were not insulting.
Part of how her attention to ‘respectful’ approaches is managed involves very subtle
signals, as described by Goffman and by Tavory cited previously, that enable flirtation part-
ners to negotiate a shift from civil inattention to partial possible attention, to determining
whether she wants to pursue an engaged conversation. Beyond the language barrier, if
Naima had been interested in Fred for other reasons, she might have made more effort
towards bridging that communicative gap – her allowing the conversation to take place
beyond his opening try may have been giving him an opportunity to find the right language
for her. In this sense, the fact that Naima responds to Fred’s conversation invitation at all can
be an invitation to continue and part of her way of finding friends or potential romantic
interests to ease her summer boredom while finally hanging out – as she had been requesting
from me and her friends for several days – in this oasis of diasporic leisure.
That management of attention and inattention becomes crucial to deconstructing the
final example, which occurred outside of any controlled or ‘safe’ consumption spaces,
but still becomes an encounter between individuals who are part of the collective
shared trajectory of DVs from Europe (Figure 2). In this instance, I was accompanying
the mid-twenties French-Arab woman Najat, along with her peer cousin Chaima and
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 335

her older married sister Slama during a shopping excursion in the city centre. The inter-
action was recorded through a microphone worn by Najat as the main research participant
and principal bargainer among the three, for conversational data on marketplace bargain-
ing. Along with several bargaining encounters that day, the recording includes the follow-
ing appearance of three young men alongside them, of whom only one audibly speaks:
Interaction extract: flirtation on the street
336 L. B. WAGNER

A full audio–visual analysis of this interaction might be more informative about the
different ways Najat, Chaima, and Slama were attentive and inattentive to these men,
but the audio recorded still provides some potential for analysis, along with some of the
embodied orientations reconstructed from fieldnotes. Though there were three women
in this group (as well as myself), the draguer seems to be conversationally addressing
Najat in particular – posing first the question ‘where are you from’ (line 3) then, when
she pauses her speech, following up with a precisely accurate guess of her hometown in
France (line 5). In other words, this stranger on the street walks up behind Najat and
guesses exactly her hometown.
Her next turn (line 6) is not a response to him directly; at that point, she was still facing
the vendor and talking with her sister and Chaima next to her. Rather, she starts talking
about him with her companions, then after he changes his guess incorrectly (line 7), she
confirms over her shoulder (still not orienting her body to him) that his first guess was
correct (line 8). The women then disattend to him – at least in the recorded audio – for
nearly a minute and a half while they continue their shopping task with that vendor,
before Slama signals readiness to depart (‘let’s go?’, line 9). After this almost two full
minutes of inattention, the draguer wishes them a nice holiday (line 12), which then
finally receives a direct response from Najat and Chaima (line 13 and 14). He then
offers his number – probably to Najat – as she replies by pushing her cousin to talk
(turn 16). Her cousin is laughing at this point, and may have said something, though
nothing is audible in the recording. Najat makes an excuse that she is with her big
sister (Slama) and therefore not talking (turn 18). In this same turn, she pushes her
cousin twice to speak for herself. No further turns are audible from the draguer, as they
walk away. Once he is out of earshot, Najat addresses her cousin again, asking if in fact
she was interested in these guys (turn 21). Her cousin replies negatively (turn 22), and
then again with more detail, but inaudibly (turn 24). Extrapolating from Najat’s final
comment, telling her cousin she should have spoken to one of the friends, Chaima may
have expressed an interest in another member of the group of men.
Like the previously described encounters, this one relies on the shared spatial presence
in Morocco as a leisure site, though not necessarily in a delineated ‘safe’ space of consump-
tion. Instead, the delineations of what is recognisably ‘safe’ come, to some extent, from the
draguer’s ability to recognise with extreme accuracy whatever semiotics might have
marked Najat’s French hometown. The semiotics he was reading are entirely unknown:
he may have recognised her accent or some other perceivable marker of that region, or
may have specifically recognised her as a person who he had previously seen in France.
In any case, even though he approached her on the uncontrolled street, his ability to pin-
point that information earned him a sidelong reply to his initial guess and enabled him to
remain there for an extremely long conversational pause (nearly two minutes) with the
hope that the flirtation might continue. That this wait was a conversational pause, and
not simply the inattention Najat and Chaima might display to completely ignore and
refuse flirtatious attention, is indicated by his well-wishing and their reply as they move
to take their leave. Their eventual reply indicates their permission to him that he (and
his friends) would be worthy of Najat and Chaima’s attention.
Yet, the encounter is still in some ways unsuccessful – no contact information was
shared – because of apparently contrasting notions of ‘respect’. While Najat claims to
not be able to respond because she was with her sister (though she may have had other
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 337

potential unstated reasons not to reply), she is simultaneously teaching her cousin how to
make these connections if they interest her. Chaima may also be negotiating issues of pro-
priety, both of her choices and tastes in ‘style’ and in her presentation in front of her two
cousins. This lack of success, however, is not in any way about the ‘mentality’ of these three
men: as indicated by Najat’s final injunction to Chaima, they were all suitable potential
flirtation partners, which indicates that the problem here was not a difference in ‘mental-
ity’ or a sense of feeling harassed on the street. Even though this group approached them in
a public site, they did so in a ‘respectful’ way that marked how DVs manage to find each
other in the crowd of public space and ‘keep ourselves among ourselves’.
These three examples delineate some of the contours of spatial presence, recognition,
and categorisation that can enable the response to an initial flirtation to switch from pur-
poseful inattention to permissible interaction. These are all accomplished following some
broad social organisation for communicative interaction but are equally about manage-
ment of spatial, contextual, and moral categorisations. These women make moral categ-
orisations relevant about what sort of man may or may not permissibly approach them
(Sanae) or under what circumstances he may do so appropriately (Najat). They engage
with the geolocational references that mark them, both in terms of where they are
present when this encounter happens (for Sanae and Naima, in the ‘safe’ consumption
space of the water park; for Najat, shopping in the medina in the company of her
family members), and in how, especially for Sanae and Najat, they share a trajectory
with the man who approaches, who can name or recognise similar homespaces in
Morocco and in Europe. Naima’s counterposing disconnection from Fred, his failed
attempt to identify a geolocalisable, mutually intelligible language between them marks
how an effective border might emerge that delineates superdiverse Moroccans-from-
Europe along communicative lines rather than other possible categorisations. Given
that she did not disattend to him completely, even these communicative borders may
be porous – since both of them were present in this ‘safe’ space for interaction with
others of a similar ‘mentality’. These three instances thus demonstrate how trajectory is
practiced, managed, and delineated through diasporic activity and time spent in
Morocco, so that possibilities for encounters with others of similar trajectories abound
while delineation between superdiverse diasporic Moroccans and others of a different
‘mentality’ become more sharply, spatially closed.

Conclusions: trajectories of diasporic diversity

As examples of what sorts of potential relationships might develop after a chance meeting
during the summer holidays, these observed events from fieldwork with Moroccans from
Europe indicate that geolocalisable trajectories become significant in ways that individuals
orient to a flirtation partner as a potential match. More so than an imagined community of
‘Moroccans’ that broadly encompasses those living in diaspora and those living in
Morocco, appropriate romantic partners are confined to those of a similar ‘mentality’
and communicating in the same language(s), and not necessarily those who come from
the same background or grew up in the same European or Moroccan hometown. These
trajectories unite diasporic Moroccans intersecting with each other as part of a superdi-
verse mobile collective, who cross paths in certain locations – like the leisure sites
where they spend time during summer holidays in Morocco.
338 L. B. WAGNER

These examples also indicate fluidity to how difference and sameness can be complexly
configured in diasporic face-to-face encounters, facilitated by the accessibility of the ances-
tral homeland as a site for leisure circulation. These complex configurations raise ques-
tions about what ‘integration’ might look like for these diverse partnerships as they
settle into European homes, but connect themselves to different geolocatable points in
various homelands. They also raise questions to how superdiversities incorporate
complex connectivities made through their mobile lives, taking place in Europe and
elsewhere.
By choosing certain consumption spaces, DVs orient themselves to a diasporic diversity
that occurs in Morocco, but is dependent upon sharing a trajectory to and from Europe.
They encounter others with parallel knowledge about Moroccan and European places, lin-
guistic capacities in Moroccan and European languages, and presence in Morocco during
the summer holiday. Even if interactants do not share all the same geolocatable reference
points, they can be assured that they share a common ‘mentality’ of what constitutes a
‘respectful’ encounter between heterosexual men and women that, for these women, is cat-
egorically relevant to being a ‘Moroccan-from-Europe’ in contrast to ‘disrespectful’ men
they encounter in public places in Morocco. Their integration – both as visitors in
Morocco and as residents (with their romantic partners) in Europe – depends on the mul-
tiplicity of places and belongings crossed by these trajectories, yet delimited by ‘respect’.
Recognising these complex diasporic trajectories, rather than categorising individuals
through other determinate labels like ‘ethnicity’, opens a perspective on how these individ-
uals, as clustered minority communities in different places in Europe, can recognise each
other across presumed similarities and differences in a complex, mobile, and evolving col-
lective that adds a different dimension to superdiversity.

Note
1. The scope of these observations is unfortunately limited to hetero-normative sexual activity.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID
Lauren B. Wagner http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4778-7408

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