Woman's Place: Gender Perspectives of Belonging and Destruction in Israel/Palestine

Dr Hagar Kotef, SOAS

Bio
Hagar Kotef is a Senior Lecturer of Political Theory and Comparative Political Thought at the Department of Politics and International Relations, SOAS, The University of London. She is the author of Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility (Duke University Press, 2015).

Abstract
Taking the feminist insight that home is a key political concept, this talk examines home-making—which is also a matter of nation-building and individual, as well as collective identities—in contexts of settler colonialism, specifically in Israel/Palestine. In such contexts "home" emerges as a site wherein hierarchies and modes of domination are re-inscribed and contested, rather than a simple refuge from violence. This conjuncture of violence and the domestic sphere relies on a long feminist tradition, which is (re-)situated here within a colonial matrix. Thinking of “home” from this perspective is an effort to understand the array of passions, attachments, and modes of belonging that are entangled with institutional, state violence. It is also a way of envisioning political models that go beyond institutional and universal models of rights, drawing instead on affect and natality. In the case of Israel/Palestine this may allow to conceive the future of the territory no longer from the point of view of ruling apparatuses, dictating a legal framework whose focus is the borders of a one-state/two-state solution, but from the point of view of those inhabiting the land, as well as those who are forced out and away from it.

Organiser: CGS

Contact email: cgs@soas.ac.uk