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Heroic Contestations: Palestinian Masculinity in Post-Oslo Literature
Abstract by Dr. Amal Amireh On Session 239  (Gender Trials in MENA II)

On Saturday, November 16 at 5:30 pm

2019 Annual Meeting

Abstract
This paper focuses on the articulation of nationalism and masculinity in the post-Oslo Palestinian narrative. While the hegemonic masculinist Palestinian national narrative posits the fida’i, the freedom fighter, as the embodiment of both manliness and Palestinianness, it is not static or uncontested. Literature is certainly one important site where this narrative is reproduced, but it is also a space where it is challenged. In this paper I will examine several literary texts by Palestinian authors to shed light on how this masculine narrative has been reproduced and reworked in post-Oslo literature. The four authors I discuss articulate nationalism and masculinity in their works from three different geopolitical locations: Ibrahim Nasrallah as a Palestinian refugee living in Jordan; Raja Shehadeh as a Palestinian subject of the Palestinian Authority and Israeli military rule in the West Bank; Atef Abu Saif as a Palestininan living in a Gaza under siege and bombardment, and Raji Bathish as a Palestinian in Israel, a member of an Arab minority in a self-identified Jewish state. Writing from these disparate locations, and making different aesthetic choices, these Palestinian authors have one crucial thing in common: they engage questions of national identity via narratives of masculinity. While Nasrallah does so by embracing a nostalgic heroic masculinity, as in his historical novel The Time of White Horses, Shehadeh in his memoir Palestinian Walks, Abu Saif in his war diary The Drone Eats with Me, and Bathish in his short story “Nakba-lite” question and ultimately reject such views of heroism in favor of a new kind of masculinity that allows for marginalized men to speak as national subjects.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies