The Crisis of Masculinity and the Presentation of Gendered Selfhood during the Palestinian Second Intifada in the Gaza Strip

Key information

Date
Time
5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
Venue
Russell Square: College Buildings
Room
4421

About this event

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED

CANCELLED

Aitemad Muhanna, Independent Researcher

This paper challenges essentialist feminist approaches that conflate women’s exercise of agency with women’s resistance to male domination. In contrast, in the situation of the Palestinian Second Intifada’s male-bread winner crisis, women in Gaza resisted the dislocation of gender structure for the sake of family economic survival by enhancing the historically-embodied image of masculinity and femininity. They rejected their role as the primary provider of the family and strengthened their jobless men’s sense of masculinity by sustaining their public image as authoritative; they also demonstrated their willing subjectivity as domesticated wives and mothers. Women challenge the masculine aspect of their agency as the primary family provider, and emphasise the feminine aspects of their agency as dedicated and self-sacrificing wives and mothers, and as dependent on their husbands and connected to other family members. In the specific context of Gaza, women act as conscious agents, constantly comparing and assessing the expected performance outcomes of socially-constructed masculine and feminine aspects of agency to realise their personal and familial goals. The arguments in my research add to knowledge that women’s agency is contingent and must be contextualized, by which the essentialist feminist discourses become too reductionist as they suggest that women’s struggles around the world have common features.

Biography:

Aitemad Muhanna is a Palestinian Researcher from Gaza Strip. She received her PhD in Development Studies from the University of Swansea/Wales. She is now affiliated to SOAS Center for Gender Studies as a Pathfinder fellow for Female Academic Refugee. She is currently working on her post-doctoral research about women’s religiosity in Gaza and how it contributes in shaping women’s meaning of life. She is also revising her thesis to be published into a book by March 2012. Although she is in her early academic career in the field of gender studies, she was extensively involved as gender and development activist in Palestine, and she contributed in number of significant publications with Palestinian Universities and international agencies. These include: a book women and work in Gaza; a book chapter, entitled “The Gaza Strip after the Israeli Withdrawal: an Assessment of Reality and a Future Vision”; and a research paper entitled Palestinian Children in the Labor Market under the Israeli occupation. She also has written dozens of research papers and consultancy reports on the crisis of development under the Israeli occupation, poverty and coping strategies, participation and community development approaches, and gender analysis.

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network hosted by the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies

Contact email: rs94@soas.ac.uk