Palestinian from femina sacra to active agents of resistance

Dr Ronit Lentin

Jawaher Abu-Rahmah, who was killed by tear gas on New Year Day 2001, was among many Palestinian women, in the state of Israel and the occupied territory, who, despite being victims of what Dr Lentin theorises as the Israeli ‘racial state’, are also active agents of resistance. Nahla Abdo (1994; 2008) historicises Palestinian women’s participation in the national struggle from the 1920s to the present, suggesting that their participation, in the first and second Intifadas for example, were not only a vital part of the resistance movement, but also had profound effect on gender relations within Palestinian society. This paper, while theorising  the Palestinian woman – citizen of Israel, or occupied subject in the Palestinian territory – as femina sacra, the female version of Agamben’s homo sacer, or ‘bare life’ (1995), and at the same time as an agent of resistance, attempts not to remain within the theoretical, combining theories with examples from the lived experiences of Palestinian women, believing, after Frantz Fanon in antiracism and anticolonialism as firmly rooted in the lived experience of the racialised.

Bio

Ronit Lentin is Head of Sociology and director of the MPhil in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict, Trinity College Dublin. She has published extensively on gender and genocide, racism in Ireland, and Israel/Palestine. Her books include Conversations with Palestinian Women (1982), Gender and Catastrophe (1997), Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence (2000), Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (with Nahla Abdo 2002), After Optimism? Ireland, Racism and Globalisation (with Robbie McVeigh, 2006), Race and State (with Alana Lentin, 2008), Performing Global Networks (with Karen Fricker, 2007), Thinking Palestine (2008) and Co-Memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba (2010).

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network and the Centre for Gender Studies (SOAS)

Contact email: N.S.Al-Ali@soas.ac.uk