Love stories and diasporic identity narratives: Mediatized practices of storytelling in the Moroccan diaspora

Storytelling is one of the oldest ways of giving human experiences a meaning and presenting the world from one’s own perspective. Stories are amongst key cultural resources for identity construction. Throughout the history of technologies, storytelling has become highly mediatized, enabling new and more interactive forms of storytelling. The presented research focuses on digital, diasporic love stories that are shared on an online diasporic discussion forum by younger women from the Moroccan diaspora in Germany. Based on a qualitative content analysis of selected story threads, this article argues that these German-speaking stories provide their readers with alternative identity narratives to those in mainstream mass media. This article will demonstrate how through these narratives users interactively negotiate issues related to ethnic identities, religious and cultural values and gender roles on the networked communication space provided by the discussion forums. Considering the limited space for self-representations of migrant Muslim women in the mainstream German mediascape, this self-made form of storytelling and the self-representations that the forums provide seem even more important for the identity construction of young women in the Moroccan diaspora. However, these stories do not always lead to dialogue and peaceful negotiations; they may also lead to deepening of conflicts existing within the diasporic community.