Abstract
In early February, 2024, the French minister of Gender Equality criticized French feminist groups alleging that they were insufficiently critical of Hamas for the unverified claims of violence against Israeli women by Hamas during the October 7 attack. As Aurore Berge, the French minister stated. the government is scrutinizing the lack of response from feminist groups to what she considered the “thousands of women who were exterminated, murdered, burned or raped by Hamas.” Feminist groups must either accept this interpretation of what happened on October 7 or risk their funding. As feminist groups repeated over and over that they condemned all violence against women and legitimately wanted to consider the evidence in this instance, their protestations fell on deaf ears. Even when the extent and description of the violence held by those such as the French minister were demonstrably false, feminists still remained censored for any efforts to call into question the evidence, and more significantly, for expressing any kind of condemnation of the violence being visited on Palestinians. The same repression of speech is visited on anyone critical of Israel. One way to understand the mines buried in the geopolitical field in which feminists find ourselves today is to examine how race and gender are co-constituted in the question of Palestine, how, that is, that race is given content through gender and operates to produce situations where it is not possible to speak about the loss of Palestinian life. We can also ask: how is gender given content through race, making it possible to only imagine the existence of Israeli women and not Palestinian women? Finally, when we understand this co-constitution, what are the implications for solidarity?
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