The paper traces Palestinian women's understandings, practices and framings of everyday resistance. Women's resistance acts consist of both materially-based survival strategies and various coping strategies at the ideational level. Focussing on the latter, this study investigates women's practices of travelling to create (a sense of) normal joyful life for themselves, their families, friends and community with the aim of shedding light upon the complex and mutually constitutive interplay between women's agency and the various social and political power structures. It is argued that Palestinian women, although framing their acts of crossing Israeli-imposed physical restriction as acts of resistance against the occupation, are in fact also seizing an opportunity to covertly challenge and trespass internal patriarchal forms of control. Keywords: Palestine, Middle East, women's activism, resistance, gender Introduction All throughout the Israeli attacks on Gaza from December 2008 to January 2009 I tried in vain to get news from Marwan, a friend in Gaza City who had helped me two months earlier to arrange interviews for my research project. (1) I never received a reply. Then, on 18 January, the first day of a very fragile ceasefire, he suddenly filled my Inbox with several jokes, including the following: An Israeli arrives at London's Heathrow airport. As he fills out the entry form, the immigration officer asks him: "Occupation?" The Israeli promptly replies: "No, no, just visiting!" I was very happy to hear from Marwan, but his outpour of humour and jokes, coming from Gaza which had been under constant bombardment and attack for more than three weeks, left me somewhat confused. The "genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza" (Pappe, 2009), killed more than 1400 people, (2) left many more wounded, and a whole population emotionally and psychologically distressed (see Thabet et. al., 2009). The attacks completely destroyed civilian infrastructure services and brought Gaza "to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe" (Shlaim, 2009:1). In response to my further inquiries about the situation--but also about his jokes--Marwan answered me in a later email: ... about Gaza and the Israeli aggression, believe me it was the worst days in my life, very difficult, ugly and horrible especially on the kids. Eight windows were broken in my flat. My wife and the kids were in the room and the glass broke on them, but thank God nothing happened to them. Plus the sound of the explosions with the sound of the F16 made my kids, and even us, suffer until this moment. My kids now are scared of everything, even if the door [just] shuts strongly from the wind. [...] About [the question of] how we can still make jokes about Israelis and the occupation?--Because we have to, we have to live and yes, you can call it "sumud". Sumud, which translates as steadfastness, can be described as a form of infra-politics, or everyday (nonviolent) resistance (Scott, 1997). (3) It is, as Marwan shows, the steadfast and stubborn insistence on carrying on with life and even seizing every opportunity to enjoy it, despite all odds. In contrast to the public, heroic and overt nonviolent resistance, which in Palestine is mostly associated with stone-throwing youth, sumud is a more covert, often individual and non-organised everyday resistance. The term is used to refer to a wide variety of acts ranging from more materially-based survival strategies (such as continuing to tend occupied agricultural land or engaging in small-scale income-generating projects to provide livelihoods) through cultural resistance (by upholding traditions, folkloric songs or dresses and other customs), to social and ideational resistance (by, for example, maintaining hope and a sense of normality). As a strategy concerned particularly with preserving family and community life sumud has been associated particularly with women's daily struggles (Johnson, 2007:602-3; Peteet, 1991 : 153; Richter-Devroe, 2008:47-51). …

/pdf/palestinian-women-s-everyday-resistance-between-normality-1aaeh745du.pdf

Palestinian Women’s Everyday Resistance: Between Normality and Normalisation

Can the pleasures of young Palestinian women from refugee camps in promenading on the Beirut seaside Corniche on a warm summer evening be political? Or days spent at women-only beaches? If so, how do we understand such pleasure as everyday practices, as a politics of the present moment, or conversely (or simultaneously) as mechanisms of being co-opted into a broader apparatus of consumerist ideology and capitalist complacency? Drawing on ethnographic research over 2 years I argue that these moments of pleasure are caesuras in the massive apparatus of power – welded from strands of work, neoliberal practice, nationalist certitudes and political exclusion – which binds these women. These acts of pleasure cannot easily be categorised as ‘resistance’ but I argue that they should not facilely be considered reinforcements of hegemonic control either. They are momentary and ephemeral recognitions of ordinary life lived in hard times, attempts at clawing back an instant of joy from the drudgery of the everyday, and a surrender to the enjoyment of conviviality in public and urban spaces. If they are at all political, they are so because such conviviality is ever harder to sustain in the calamity of hopelessness that characterises so much politics today.

/pdf/the-politics-of-pleasure-promenading-on-the-corniche-and-38qn80cqjq.pdf

The politics of pleasure: Promenading on the Corniche and beachgoing

............................................................................................................................................... II

Subaltern rightful struggles : comparative ethnographies of the Bedouin villagers in the Naqab and the akhdam slum dwellers in Sana'a

This article studies a new shopping and entertainment centre in Istanbul, Zeruj Port, founded and run by young Muslim female entrepreneurs who specialize in Islamic modest fashion. Based on an ethnographic enquiry, the article analyses how female Muslim entrepreneurs in this unique women-themed mall develop new forms of Islamic fashion and leisure, thereby giving a new meaning to female piety in contemporary Turkey. Female Muslim entrepreneurs have emerged as the new tastemakers in the market, seeking to accommodate western trends in fashion and leisure without making major concessions to the consumer market, but also without completely conforming to the dominant Islamic discourses on fashion and leisure. These pious female entrepreneurs achieve this using reconciliation strategies based on notions of individualism. However, the article discusses cases where these young female actors do not so easily challenge Islamic rules of propriety regarding fashion and leisure. Thus, the article concludes that the fashion and leisure performances of female Muslim entrepreneurs subversively accommodate existing regimes of truth about female piety.

Piety, Fashion and Festivity In A Modest Fashion Shopping Mall In Istanbul

By drawing from the engagement with the empirical case of sumud (Arabic: steadfastness) in Palestine, this article focuses on the social and political implications of everyday life in conflict settings. Proposing an alternative perspective on conflicts, this article argues that it is important also to focus on normalcy of everyday life in conflict settings and how this transforms conflict dynamics. Hence, contrary to the assumption that there is an opposition between the normalcy of everyday life and violent conflicts, this article argues that everyday life is not disrupted but that it goes on also in the face of conflicts, it only has to adapt to it. Building on Stephen Lubkemann’s concept of ‘culturally scripted life projects’, this article will show how the attempt to pursue a regular life unfolds in an everyday setting in order to escape the predominant conflict/resistance frame. In addition to sumud as an individual practice this article highlights the broader social and political role this concept assumes in the context of Palestinian nationalism. In order to illustrate this argument, this article presents sumud as a spatial quotidian practice which is primarily aimed at realising culturally scripted life project in the face of the Israeli occupation. 

/pdf/everyday-life-in-the-face-of-conflict-sumud-as-a-spatial-1stg9fwg.pdf

Everyday life in the face of conflict: Sumud as a spatial quotidian practice in Palestine

The Politics of Gaza Beach

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The Politics of Gaza Beach