The portrayal of people with disabilities in Moroccan proverbs and jokes

The depiction of physical impairments in popular culture reflects as well as moulds public perception and attitudes towards people with disabilities. The vast body of literature has been devoted to the analysis and documentation of images of disabilities on the Internet, literary fiction, films, advertisements and television programming in the western societies, but there has been less attention directed towards exploring the representation of people with disabilities in popular culture in nonwestern societies. This article explores how people with disabilities are portrayed in Moroccan popular culture, especially in jokes and proverbs. The study utilized faceto-face semi-structured interviews for collecting qualitative data regarding the status of people with disabilities in Moroccan popular culture. Convenience sampling was used in the research. Our findings suggest that the dominant themes of Moroccan popular culture replicate stereotypical images of people with impairment in western popular culture as ‘pitiable or pathetic’, ‘sinister or evil’, ‘laughable’, as a ‘burden’, ‘non-sexual’ and ‘unable to participate in daily life’. Although all these themes can be traced in the instances of Moroccan popular culture, the theme of sexuality of people with disabilities seems to prevail.