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Love Letters to Gaza
Abstract
This paper centers the forms of transnational feminist kinship and care work that Palestinian women perform within and beyond the geographies of the Palestinian homeland through letter writing as an abolitionist feminist praxis of decolonial love. I begin by offering an overview of Zionist colonialism as a genocidal project that holds Palestinian bodies, socialities, intimacies, and subjectivities captive for eliminatory violence and removal. Grounded in the testimonies of Palestinian women surviving genocide in Gaza collected by Birzeit University’s Institute for Women’s Studies, and letters written in response by members of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, a Turtle Island based movement organization, I examine the resuturing of feminist intimacies through love as a critical feminist consciousness and praxis that transcends colonial borders, boundaries and fragmentation of territories and people imposed by the Zionist regime. The letters to Gaza themselves as material archives, and the Palestinian sensorium they evoke labor in service of transforming grief into radical hope, a key catalyst for emancipatory struggle against colonial violence, marking possibilities for ecologies of life, and giving shape to an ethical transnational community of feminist praxes of resistance.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
None