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Throwing Like a Palestinian Girl: Resisting Resilience
Abstract
How do resistance and resilience relate to one another in a site of conflict? This paper addresses this question through the specific case of the female-identifying bodies of the Palestinian youth engaged in choreographed and semi-choreographed actions of resistance against the Israel Defense and Security Forces in the twenty-first century. In particular, through my Dance and Performance Studies lens and by adopting choreographic analysis as my main methodology, I will focus on how Palestinian female teenagers organize their specific act of throwing rocks not only against occupying powers but as a broader gesture of defiance against patriarchy and antagonistic male subjects at the local, regional, and transnational level. Theoretically, as the first part of the title suggests, this paper references the renown essays by political theorist Iris Marion Young and dance scholar Susan Foster (“Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality” and “’Throwing like a Girl’? Gender in a Transnational World”), expanding the conversation to the complex construction of Arab female corporealities in relation to militarily, politically and socially-constructed apparatuses of conflict. The second part of the title synthesizes my argument as stemmed from the choreographic analysis of amateur, activist, and journalistic videos of Palestinian girls throwing rocks in protests, further informed by ethnographic research in the Occupied Territories. The expression “resisting resilience” presents a double-reading: resilience as a form of resistance and resilience as obstructing resistance. Indeed, in the light of this case study, this paper shows how specific subjectivities, in order to affirm themselves, need to depart from notions of resilience theorized in colonial contexts and advocate for forward-looking and radically transformative futures.
Discipline
Art/Art History
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries