At least since the publication of Foucault's seminal work on the creation of the medicalized body, "The Birth of the Clinic," it has been clear to scholars and others that the field of medicine and health more generally is intimately connected with political and social power exchanges in society. Thus, the classification of diseases, their identification, their prevention and cure are not ideologically neutral acts but are in fact part of the way in which medical and scientific knowledge function as power media in the modern world. In many if not all societies, medical knowledge has also been entwined with the creation of a gendered public discourse that is used to control women's bodies while appropriating the idea of womanhood for political aims. In such circumstances, women become either the carriers of colonial modernity in the face of the denial of such modernity by colonizing powers or they are seen as the repositories of traditional knowledge and practices, in which case they are denied the chance for coevalness by their male counterparts in the anti-colonial struggle. Paradoxically, women are sometimes asked to play both roles simultaneously, resulting in conflicting discourses about women's roles in the public sphere and the national body. In this paper, "Women, Health and the National Body in the Iraqi Shi'i Public Sphere, 1935-1939," I explore the nationalist appropriation of women's bodies and social practices in the name of public hygiene in the discourse of Shi'i Iraqi intellectuals between 1935 and 1939, and the ways in which this discourse created a set of contradictory expectations for Shi'i women in interwar-era Iraq. The paper is structured around a series of newspaper articles from the 1930s published in al-Hatif, a Shi'i journal from Iraq, that articulate the links between the female body, women's domestic and social practices and the health of the Iraqi nation and of its Shi'i citizens.

The voluminous diaries of Khalil al-Sakakini (1878-1953), written mostly in Jerusalem between 1907 and 1952, have been a rich source for historical inquiry, yet there has thus far been little attempt to provide a thorough investigation of this complex personage. The period during which Sakakini lived and wrote was one of undeniable change, yet the ways in which he has been described in the secondary literature on this period (devoted nationalist, patriotic father, dedicated teacher, etc.) have left us with little room to examine the way he made sense of these changes. Throughout the diary, we observe Sakakini constantly negotiating, defining and redefining his different selves, often leading to contradiction. His curious and mercurial disposition can therefore provide a lens through which we may examine the ways in which these changes and ideological confrontations played out in the mind of an individual. The aim of this study is to respond to the existing literature by providing an in-depth examination of this historical character as he presents himself in his diary. Using theories from psychology and sociology (cognitive dissonance and habitus), this research adds to our appreciation for the way in which social change brought about by conflicting nationalist and colonial ideologies can impact an individual. As a work in micro-history, this investigation thus has broader implications for an evaluation of historians' tendency to construct dominant narratives on this period in Palestinian history.

My readings of three literary texts authored by Palestinian men recast ghurba (exile) and placelessness at a historical intersection between displacement and loss of the homeland and the gendered sense of self. De-linking violence and masculinity, I will attempt to read Edward Said ("Out of Place"), Ghassan Kanafani ("Men in the Sun") and Sayed Kashua ("Dancing Arabs") as articulating different subject positions that speak of alienation, place and the lack thereof as constitutive of the masculine self. Moreover, while previous scholarship of Palestinian masculinities perceived Palestinian-ess and manliness respectful of national and racial boundaries (Israel / Palestine and Arab / Jew) and have been tied to discrete locations, I suggest a transnational framework as an alternative for reading processes of masculinizing and self-fashioning. The three authors were / are Palestinians, yet the texts they produced reflect their distinct physical, social and cultural positionalities and experiences. More importantly, the experiences that these texts record (whether they are based on the authors' memories, imagination or both) narrate cross-border passages and processes of mobility and placelessness as unexpected opportunities for freedom from patriarchal dictates, nationalist masculine scripts and sexual anxieties. They were able to mobilize their sense of placelesness, victimhood and affect to find liberation in narration and to produce bodies that "expand" rather than "contract," in both the physical sense of actual movement between national borders and racial boundaries and in a more symbolic sense, of gaining prominent positions of "speaking for".

I am interested in how nationalist elites worked to capture and create the bodies of Syrians in the course of the 1930s. By examining physical activity as it manifested itself in schools, scouting, and soccer, I will look at some of the disciplinary technologies that the state used to make new men for the nation in an attempt to understand how the meaning of being a man changed in this context. Through physical education in schools, the government worked to create men with sound minds and bodies, reflecting a desire to break with the colonial past. In scouting, the government hoped to expose young men to the rough life and engender a desire to serve the nation. With soccer matches, the government attached national significance to athletic contests as a register of modernity and progress. The latter two venues especially involved the concept of performance: as scouts marched through the streets in orderly parades and soccer sides glided across the pitch in organized movement, crowds paid attention. As a result, the nation's new men were not simply created in private toil; rather, they were displayed for all to see. A powerful theme in all of these activities is the sense that urban Syrian men had become effeminate from the comforts of a burgeoning consumer society while rural Syrian men had become backward in their ignorance of contemporary technologies. By championing both mental acuity and corporeal strength, many of these activities might be seen as attempts to resolve this tension. Another powerful if perhaps less explicit theme is the connection between new images of masculinity and the mandate state. The premise of the mandate system - that Syrians were unfit to rule and had to be taught by the more mature French - is etched into these responses. Physical activity provided a means for Syrians to display their literal robustness for the figurative endeavor of making a nation. In order to approach these issues, I am relying on the newspaper al-Qabas, the organ of the most prominent elite nationalist group in this time period and a rich record of the various elite efforts to control male bodies and, to a lesser extent, popular responses to these plans. In doing so, I hope to shift the perspective away from a conventional political narrative of the French mandate and toward an analysis of the politics of masculinity in this context.

This paper will draw on the findings of my larger doctoral research project, which examines the motivations behind Israel's various fertility policies from the state's establishment in 1948 up until 2008. The paper will pay particularly close attention to the extent to which the archival (and various other primary) sources substantiate the claim that Israel has constructed and maintained an ethnically selective pro-natalist policy that seeks to simultaneously encourage a higher Jewish birthrate and a lower non-Jewish, specifically Palestinian-Arab, one. In other words, this paper will seek to answer the question of whether Israel's demographic need, or desire, to maintain a Jewish majority has extended into the formulation of its reproductive policies - as well as its immigration and land policies. Moreover, in parallel, the paper will look into the various other key factors that may have influenced the construction of the state's policies vis contraception, abortion, advanced reproductive technologies, and so on. As such, this paper will contribute further to our understanding of the specific ways in which bodies, and the most seemingly intimate decisions connected to them, have become the sites of larger state projects, including national and colonial.