AME-Anthropology of Gender, Victimization and Power in Conflict and Exile
Panel 014, 2013 Annual Meeting
On Thursday, October 10 at 5:30 pm
Panel Description
The papers on this panel investigate dynamics of gender and power in conflict and exile. Together we interrogate and unsettle narratives of female victimization by focusing on gendered strategies of resistance, women's accounts of heroism and steadfastedness, their roles as family providers, health keepers, and defenders of land. We do this not to deny victimization but to give it depth, nuance, limits, alernatives and even agency. Gendered bodies--sexually violated, abused, but also health seeking, sustenance providing, asylum applying and powerful--feature prominently in our analyses. The complexities of power that emerge include resistance, such as when Palestinian women in the WB better evade military restrictions and thus farm their lands. These women challenge both Israeli military occupation and resist attempts to wrest control of their property and they also challenge their association with the domestic, as birthers of the nation and keepers of tradition by taking on land defender roles typically considered male. The complexities in the panel also include unexpected spaces of empowerment, such as when Palestinian refugee women do not challenge their association with domestic space but transform the domestic itself into a site of politics. Additionally, asylum seeking Arab women and gay men may dramatize their systematic oppression thereby transforming bodily scars and histories of abuse into tools for immigration thus instrumentalizing their victimization. Asylum seekers from Shatila camp redefine the relationship between home and homeland and offer narratives that cut against the grain of mainstream Palestinian nationalism. Kurdish migrant women in Italy do not see themselves as victims of illness, but as active agents who utilize informal transnational networks to navigate various healthcare systems.
The contexts of each of the four contributions varies--from Palestinian rural women in the West Bank, to various Arab women and gay men in immigration court in NJ, from Palestinian refugee women in Jordan, to Palestinian male refugees seeking to leave Shatila in Lebanon, to Kurdish women in a Rome clinic. As researchers, we follow related questions about gender and victimization in a wide range of settings, that expand the traditional boundaries of the MENA. Together, these contributions construct a larger spatial and symblic context for analysing gendered dynamics of power and resistance, of land and homeland, of exile and trauma. They show how the body is a central locus through which experiences of trauma and exile, of family care and health, of resistance and asylum seeking can be understood.
My paper focuses on Arab women and gay men who seek gender or sexuality based asylum in the United States. This type of asylum was introduced in the mid 1990s with two landmark cases, one of a Muslim woman fleeing female circumcision in Togo and another of a gay man escaping government abuse in Cuba. The number of gender and sexuality-based asylum applications has been growing since. The legal process requires that the applicant provide proof of a reasonable expectation of persecution. However, particular types of gender/sexuality persecution appear to be associated with different regions of the world, and thus more likely to be accepted as legitimate grounds for asylum. For the Arab Middle East, I suggest that a framework of the threat of so-called honor-killing is frequently used and seems to be well received by asylum officers and judges. Interestingly, many queer Arab men appeal to this honor-killing framework in their applications as well.
This paper is based on anthropological field research in 2012 and 2013 involving 10 asylum cases in the New York and New Jersey area. The applicants came from 4 different Middle Eastern countries: Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian West Bank and Lebanon. As a volunteer Arabic interpreter for non-profit and pro-bono lawyers, I met the applicants and accompanied them through different stages of the application process and levels of appeal.
I analyze how applications for asylum, particularly the required narratives of persecution in Arab Muslim society, construct a geography of gender danger. How are the narratives made to speak to asylum law, officers and judges in a context that is generally hostile to Muslim immigration? And what sort of assumptions about gender, sexuality, class, religion, culture and "country conditions" are made and challenged? What sorts of negotiations occur between client and attorney to craft potentially successful affidavits and testimony? How are bodily scars and personal histories of abuse used to carve a new space for the applicants. These deployments of gendered victimization are compared and contrasted to the asylum applications of heterosexual Arab men whose roles as good husbands and fathers are often emphasized. The supporting documents that attorneys compile concerning country conditions are similarly unpacked. Taken together these cases appear to draw an interesting map of gender, sexuality and political power.
I first met Mahmoud seated on a chair propped up against the wall of his house in Shatila, camp in Beirut. He was watching three men mend a broken sewer. Mahmoud was in his early twenties. He told me he liked to watch people working because it relieved the intolerable pressure of forced idleness. The image of Mahmoud silently watching laborers at work stuck in my mind as a troubling inversion of the classic Marxist definition of labor in which you work to rest, an almost literal equivalent of watching paint dry, where the mind settles on something constructive in order to generate a sense of momentum where there is none. Unemployed and deprived of the opportunities that would give meaning to daily life, Mahmoud’s experience was like that of many of Shatila’s disenfranchised young men, for whom a history of dispossession and displacement has evolved into one of immobility and exclusion. Unemployment is particularly debilitating for men because it prevents them from fulfilling cultural expectations of marrying and establishing households of their own.
In a context where the future appears foreclosed the act of moving elsewhere opens up spaces of possibility. Increasingly, young men like Mahmoud are turning to emigration as a means of resisting the humiliation they experience and regaining agency and control. Both in its planning and execution, emigration has created space for speculation and hope because it introduces the possibility of discontinuity—both spatial and temporal—between who (and where) one is and what one might become.
My paper explores the social, political and existential significance of migration among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. My analysis brings together the political economy of migration––both in its local and transnational dimensions––with a detailed ethnography of the culture and politics that surrounds it. Following histories of individual men as the move from one world to another, I consider the place of gender in the migratory project and the complex interplay of subjective and structural forces. The lure of futures elsewhere reveals aspirations that cut against the grain of Palestinian nationalism: seeking asylum in a third country complicates the relationship between home and homeland in subtle but significant ways. Examining the place migration now occupies within the Palestinian political imaginary involves rethinking the relationship between nation, people and place, and therefore contributes––albeit indirectly––to the reimagining of political alternatives.
Sumud – the Palestinian resistance strategy of persistence and steadfastness – has received much scholarly attention as well as critique. In particular the PLO’s institutionalised sumud discourse of the 1970s/80s has been criticised for risking promoting a passive statist traditionalist strategy of mere holding on to the land. But sumud has also been associated with femininity, silent endurance and sacrifice. As such it might bear the danger of reducing women’s political contributions to their reproductive, caring and providing role.
In this paper, I would like to revisit gendered meanings and practices of sumud, and trace their evolvements after 2000. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the West Bank from 2007-2011, I focus on rural women’s struggles to access and tender their agricultural lands. Agricultural work is one of the major activities though which women have tried to maintain the family economy and livelihoods. They – often in accordance with their unemployed husbands – claim that it is easier for women to sneak around Israeli-imposed restrictions, and that the violence and threats they receive are less harmful than those that their male kin would have had to face. Women tend to present their acts of accessing and tending their occupied lands as a form of sumud, of holding on to the land.
Such land-related framings of sumud have a decidedly different meaning today, in the post-2000 context of tightened Israeli spatial control, than they had in the PLO’s institutionalised sumud discourse of the 1970s/80s. Given that the structural and direct violence imposed through Israeli settler-colonial policies today intrudes into all aspects of Palestinian everyday life, women’s acts of defying this violence by accessing and working the land should be understood as a pro-active survival strategy through which women claim and actively enact their role as family providers, and even as protectors of the land.
Sumud, if understood and practiced in such an active way, does not assign women a passive role of victims or mere carers in the struggle. All women I spoke to cherished their innovative survival strategies; they tend to exchange their tactics and help each other. Although they might not imbue their acts explicitly with political meanings, they view themselves as active agents, rather than passive victims, when engaging in and devising sumud strategies. As such sumud in Palestine today constitutes a way for women to challenge victimisation narratives, and instead reclaim their humanity, dignity and right to a normal life.
“Here in Italy I go to the doctor alone, although I do not understand everything, it is the same for the doctor! We are both in difficulty! (Whereas In Turkey doctors would have obliged her to speak in Turkish and not Kurmanji)”.
(Rihan, married with two children. Venice 2010)
“My mother sent me here - Italy - after my father’s death in order to stay with my younger brother who is a refugee in Italy with severe health problems due to tortures received in the Turkish prison). She told me that her wish was to hear my brother’s voice and mine together so she could have died peacefully”. (Rojin, single woman. Rome 2011)
Women are often considered responsible for their families’ health care needs beyond their economic, social and educational status. ‘The body, as the focal point of self-construction as well as health construction, implicates gender in the everyday experience of health’ (Saltonstall 1993). In the Kurdish case the family can be seen as representing an extended body that takes into account all of its members. In this paper I explore Kurdish women’s everyday acts, decisions and narratives on the issues of health and illness in their life prior to, during and after their migration experience in Italy. Spatial and temporal dimensions are seen as a flow where the violence, oppression and exclusions experienced in Turkey are combined with women’s new status in Italy enabling women to act as experts in transforming their strategies regarding health. Based on ethnographic research and interviews conducted between 2010 and 2012 with Kurdish migrant women (aged 16-70) I argue that Kurdish migrant women in Italy do not refer to themselves as victims or mere providers of care but as active agents involved in the transformation of their practices and discourses. By using (among other strategies) transnational informal networks around Europe, interviewees seem not only to ensure the possibility of preserving and practicing traditional home made remedies and treatments, but also to expand the biomedical realm through the possibility of addressing themselves to different national health systems (other than the Italian and Turkish one).
