Bodies, Power, and Resistance in the Middle East ─ Experiences of Subjectification in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

The book examines how exercises of power and processes of security exercised in the Occupied Palestinian Territories have formed Palestinian women as subjects.

The work argues that the exercises of power that form Palestinian women as subjects are targeting at controlling and disciplining their bodies, that these exercises of power make them insecure, and, that Palestinian women employ a wide variety of resistances in their daily lives to challenge this insecurity. In relation to resistance, it argues that Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation is far more complex and prevalent than the violent resistances that make the headlines may lead us to believe.

The objectives are to expose how the exclusions of women’s daily-lived experiences of conflict in the occupied Palestinian territories obscures how power operates, to demonstrate how the elements of Israeli security practices make women insecure, and to highlight how resistance to the occupation can be found embedded within daily life in the occupied territories. Ultimately, all of these themes can be related more broadly to how women might experience conflict and resist subjectification by exposing different ways that subjectifications result in insecurities and resistance to those insecurities. While the book is specific to women in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the exercises of power and enactments of resistance it exposes demonstrate how important it is to take seriously the Feminist argument that ‘the personal is international, and the international is personal.’

This book will be of much interest to students of gender politics, critical security studies, Middle Eastern politics, sociology and IR in general.