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A Gendered Politics of Life: Embroidery as a Source of Economic Sustenance and Cultural Continuity
Abstract
In this paper, I work to understand the making of an informal politics by way of social reproduction for those living under settler colonialism and military occupation. The current scholarship on social reproduction focuses on women’s roles regarding childbearing and caring for children and/or the community. However, there is a different means by which social reproduction influences life and politics, which is through cultural continuity/preservation in the face of dispossession and erasure. This strand of social reproduction is acknowledged in the literature (e.g. Federici, 2019, 312); but has not been fully explored. In this paper, I look at the ways in which women, through their everyday practices of survival, create a politics of life, through social reproduction. Anthropologist Didier Fassin was first to coin the term “politics of life” to refer to an understanding of politics not from the outside (i.e. the state or institutions), but from the inside and “in the flesh of the everyday experience[s]” (Fassin, 2009, 57). Recently, anthropologist Ilana Feldman expanded on Fassin’s work by using humanitarianism as a site since most of its actors claim to act outside of formal politics (2018). Feldman uses Palestinian refugee camps as her context, exploring the ways in which people “act politically” (2018, 4). In this paper, I expand on Fassin and Feldman’s work by focusing on social reproduction as a gendered politics of life, a politics that seeks to understand how ordinary women operate within their everyday lives and unintentionally “act politically” (Feldman, 2018). This paper uses Palestinian embroidery to explore a gendered politics of life or a way of acting politically. I use ethnographic research of Palestinian women who currently embroider and sell their products in historic Palestine. I have discovered that these women are embroidering the very cultural materials that hold up a nation and a fragmented people. The women who embroider the pieces that carry Palestine all over the world would not be considered politically active since they are unseen, their work is done in silence and at home, but their work is the backbone of Palestinian culture and heritage. Embroidery serves as material expression of Palestinian experience, history, and identity. Embroidery serves multiple purposes: a source of economic self-sustenance, creates an invisible (ironically through vibrant and colorful materials) historical and cultural connection shared by Palestinians across the world, and enables cultural preservation and cultural continuity in the face of erasure, fragmentation, and dispossession.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies