Women's Political Activism in Palestine
Title | Women's Political Activism in Palestine PDF eBook |
Author | Sophie Richter-Devroe |
Publisher | University of Illinois Press |
Pages | 274 |
Release | 2018-09-19 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 025205055X |
During the last twenty years, Palestinian women have practiced creative and often informal everyday forms of political activism. Sophie Richter-Devroe reflects on their struggles to bring about social and political change. Richter-Devroe's ethnographic approach draws from revealing in-depth interviews and participant observation in Palestine. The result: a forceful critique of mainstream conflict resolution methods and the failed woman-to-woman peacebuilding projects so lauded around the world. The liberal faith in dialogue as core of "the political" and the assumption that women's "nurturing" nature makes them superior peacemakers, collapse in the face of past and ongoing Israeli state violences. Instead, women confront Israeli settler colonialism directly and indirectly in their popular and everyday acts of resistance. Richter-Devroe's analysis zooms in on the intricate dynamics of daily life in Palestine, tracing the emergent politics that women articulate and practice there. In shedding light on contemporary gendered "politics from below" in the region, the book invites a rethinking of the workings, shapes, and boundaries of the political.
Gender in Crisis
Title | Gender in Crisis PDF eBook |
Author | Julie Peteet |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Pages | 260 |
Release | 1992-02-17 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 9780231516051 |
Gender in Crisis
Women, Reconciliation and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Title | Women, Reconciliation and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict PDF eBook |
Author | Giulia Daniele |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 223 |
Release | 2014-04-16 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 1317936256 |
Women, Reconciliation and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict explores the most prominent instances of women’s political activism in the occupied Palestinian territories and in Israel, focussing primarily on the last decade. By taking account of the heterogeneous narrative identities existing in such a context, the author questions the effectiveness of the contributions of Palestinian and Israeli Jewish women activists towards a feasible renewal of the ‘peace process’, founded on mutual recognition and reconciliation. Based on feminist literature and field research, this book re-problematises the controversial liaison between ethno-national narratives, feminist backgrounds and women’s activism in Palestine/Israel. In detail, the most relevant salience of this study is the provision of an additional contribution to the recent debate on the process of making Palestinian and Israeli women activists more visible, and the importance of this process as one of the most meaningful ways to open up areas of enquiry around major prospects for the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tackling topical issues relating to alternative resolutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this book will be a valuable resource for both academics and activists with an interest in Middle East Politics, Gender Studies, and Conflict Resolution.
Palestinian Women’s Activism
Title | Palestinian Women’s Activism PDF eBook |
Author | Islah Jad |
Publisher | Syracuse University Press |
Pages | 283 |
Release | 2018-12-26 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0815654596 |
Jad traces the transformation of the Palestinian women’s movement from the 1930s to the post-Oslo period and through the Second Intifada to examine the often-fraught relationship between women and nationalism in Palestine. Offering one of the first intensive studies of Islamist women’s activism, Jad also explores the impact of emerging feminist NGOs in depoliticizing the secular Palestinian women’s movement. Studying these two developments together illuminates the nature of women’s engagement in the Palestinian space, challenging myths of gender roles’ “immutability” under Islam and the supposed “modernizing” benefits of Western-style activism.
Girls of Liberty
Title | Girls of Liberty PDF eBook |
Author | Margalit Shilo |
Publisher | Brandeis University Press |
Pages | 218 |
Release | 2016-04-05 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1611689252 |
Following the Balfour Declaration and the British conquest of Palestine (1917-1918), the small Jewish community that lived there wanted to establish an elected assembly as its representative body. The issue that hindered this aim was whether women would be part of it. A group of feminist Zionist women from all over the country created a political party that participated in the elections, even before women's suffrage was enacted. This unique phenomenon in Mandatory Palestine resulted in the declaration of women's equal rights in all aspects of life by the newly founded Assembly of Representatives. Margalit Shilo examines the story of these activists to elaborate on a wide range of issues, including the Zionist roots of feminism and nationalism; the ultra-Orthodox Jewish sector's negation of women's equality; how traditional Jewish concepts of women fashioned rabbinical attitudes on the question of women's suffrage; and how the fight for women's suffrage spread throughout the country. Using current gender theories, Shilo compares the Zionist suffrage struggle to contemporaneous struggles across the globe, and connects this nearly forgotten episode, absent from Israeli historiography, with the present situation of Israeli women. This rich analysis of women's right to vote within this specific setting will appeal to scholars and students of Israel studies, and to feminist and social historians interested in how contexts change the ways in which activism is perceived and occurs.
Righteous Transgressions
Title | Righteous Transgressions PDF eBook |
Author | Lihi Ben Shitrit |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Pages | 299 |
Release | 2015-12-08 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 1400873843 |
A comparative look at female political activism in today's most influential Israeli and Palestinian religious movements How do women in conservative religious movements expand spaces for political activism in ways that go beyond their movements' strict ideas about male and female roles? How and why does this activism happen in some movements but not in others? Righteous Transgressions examines these questions by comparatively studying four groups: the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, the ultra-Orthodox Shas, the Islamic Movement in Israel, and the Palestinian Hamas. Lihi Ben Shitrit demonstrates that women's prioritization of a nationalist agenda over a proselytizing one shapes their activist involvement. Ben Shitrit shows how women construct "frames of exception" that temporarily suspend, rather than challenge, some of the limiting aspects of their movements' gender ideology. Viewing women as agents in such movements, she analyzes the ways in which activists use nationalism to astutely reframe gender role transgressions from inappropriate to righteous. The author engages the literature on women's agency in Muslim and Jewish religious contexts, and sheds light on the centrality of women's activism to the promotion of the spiritual, social, cultural, and political agendas of both the Israeli and Palestinian religious right. Looking at the four most influential political movements of the Israeli and Palestinian religious right, Righteous Transgressions reveals how the bounds of gender expectations can be crossed for the political good.
Embodying Geopolitics
Title | Embodying Geopolitics PDF eBook |
Author | Nicola Pratt |
Publisher | University of California Press |
Pages | 327 |
Release | 2020-10-27 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 0520281764 |
When women took to the streets during the mass protests of the Arab Spring, the subject of feminism in the Middle East and North Africa returned to the international spotlight. In the subsequent years, countless commentators treated the region’s gender inequality as a consequence of fundamentally cultural or religious problems. In so doing, they overlooked the specifically political nature of these women’s activism. Moving beyond such culturalist accounts, this book turns to the relations of power in regional and international politics to understand women’s struggles for their rights. Based on over a hundred extensive personal narratives from women of different generations in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, Nicola Pratt traces women’s activism from national independence through to the Arab uprisings, arguing that activist women are critical geopolitical actors. Weaving together these personal accounts with the ongoing legacies of colonialism, Embodying Geopolitics demonstrates how the production and regulation of gender is integrally bound up with the exercise and organization of geopolitical power, with consequences for women’s activism and its effects.