The Sister Syndrome: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Misogyny,Sexuality and Honor in Moroccan Football Fandom

Abstract

This study examines the discursive construction of sexism in Moroccan football fandom through a digital ethnography of online posts and stadium banners. Drawing on Facebook posts and widely circulated Ultras banners, the analysis explores how gendered exclusion is produced and normalized in contemporary fan communities. Using Teun A. van Dijk's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study examines lexical choices, syntactic patterns, and rhetorical devices—such as epiphora, metaphor, and hyperbole—that portray women as biologically unfit, morally loose, or out of place in stadiums. At the meso-level, the analysis reveals shared social cognitions that position women as an out-group whose presence threatens the imagined authenticity of male fandom. At the macro-level, informed by feminist theory, the findings show how these discourses reproduce broader patriarchal norms in Moroccan society, including gendered gatekeeping of public space, moral policing of women's bodies, and the use of female kinship “sisters” as tools for male-to-male humiliation. The findings demonstrate that sexist fan discourse operates as a patterned ideological practice that contributes to the exclusion of women from Moroccan football fandom and public life.