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Between 'Normality' and 'Normalisation': Palestinian Women's Everyday Resistance
Abstract
This paper traces Palestinian women’s understandings, practices and framings of everyday resistance (?um?d) after 2000. Women’s everyday resistance acts consist of both materially-based survival strategies and various coping strategies at the ideational level. Focussing on the latter, I investigate women’s practices of travelling to create (a sense of) normal joyful life for themselves, their families, friends and community. When pursuing some form of normalcy and joy through travelling, women often frame their acts as ‘resistance’ against Israeli occupation policies which not only fragment their living spaces, but also intend to render them powerless and devoid of agency. Doing so, women counter and reject attempts to de-legitimise and brand their striving for a normal life as a form of 'normalisation' of the abnormal situation of the occupation. Based on ca. 80 interviews conducted during 11 months field research in mainly the West Bank from 2007-2010, I outline the multiple and ambiguous meanings of Palestinian women’s mundane struggles, highlighting the growing hybridisation of women’s subjectivities. Women’s reclaiming of their occupied spaces through travelling, of course, constitutes only a tactic to temporarily circumvent Israeli-imposed mobility restrictions. On an ideational level their acts of trespassing physical borders to enjoy life, however, might be a more long-term strategy to resist the intended effects of Israeli “spacio-cidal” policies (Hanafi, 2009) by creating and maintaining own alternative cultural spaces. Finally, I argue that women going on leisure trips, besides subverting physical and ideational forms of Israeli control, also challenge and bargain, practically and discursively, with patriarchal power structures at national, community and family level. Bibliography Hanafi, S. (2009) “Spacio-cide: colonial politics, invisibility and rezoning in Palestinian territory” Contemporary Arab Affairs, Vol. 2, No. 1.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
West Bank
Sub Area
None