Bodies Power And Resistance In The Middle East

The book examines how exercises of power and processes of security exercised in the Occupied Palestinian Territories have formed Palestinian women as subjects. To understand how women experience occupation, this book examines the various ways in which the occupation is directed at making Palestinian women into subjects of power. The work argues that the exercises of power are focused on controlling and disciplining women’s bodies. 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.

This book affords a panoramic view of the twentieth and twenty-first century Middle East through occupation, oppression and political resistance.

This book investigates the power of civil society in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), in the context of the post-Arab Spring era, as well as more long-standing challenges and constraints in the region. In recent years, local civil society actors have faced significant challenges from social conservatism, conflict, violence, and the absence of democracy and exclusive political systems. Over the course of the book, the authors investigate how the sector has succeeded in achieving its own objectives despite these shifting conditions, the restrictive political environment and the complexity of the socio-cultural and economic context. Structured around the three themes of peace-building, development, and change, the book also addresses challenges faced by civil society organizations linked to ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversities as well as religious salient differences that are crucial markers of social and political identity. Case studies are drawn from the Palestinian Occupied Territories, Jordan, Iran, Nigeria, Niger, Egypt, and Morocco, and particular effort has been made to showcase original research from contributors who are from the region . This book will be of particular interest to researchers working on development, peace-building, conflict resolution, civil society, and politics within the MENA region.

This study highlights the connections between power, cultural products, resistance, and the artistic strategies through which that resistance is voiced in the Middle East. Exploring cultural displays of dissent in the form of literary works, films, and music, the collection uses the concept of 'cultural resistance' to describe the way culture and cultural creations are used to resist or even change the dominant political, social, economic, and cultural discourses and structures either consciously or unconsciously. The contributors do not claim that these cultural products constitute organized resistance movements, but rather that they reflect instances of defiance that stem from their peculiar contexts. If culture can be used to consolidate and perpetuate power relations in societies, it can also be used as the site of resistance to oppression in its various forms: gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, subverting existing dominant social and political hegemonies in the Middle East.

The seventeen essays in Women and Power in the Middle East analyze the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that shape gender systems in the Middle East and North Africa. Published at different times in Middle East Report, the journal of the Middle East Research and Information Project, the essays document empirically the similarities and differences in the gendering of relations of power in twelve countries—Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iran. Together they seek to build a framework for understanding broad patterns of gender in the Arab-Islamic world. Challenging questions are addressed throughout. What roles have women played in politics in this region? When and why are women politically mobilized, and which women? Does the nature and impact of their mobilization differ if it is initiated by the state, nationalist movements, revolutionary parties, or spontaneous revolt? And what happens to women when those agents of mobilization win or lose? In investigating these and other issues, the essays take a look at the impact of rapid social change in the Arab-Islamic world. They also analyze Arab disillusionment with the radical nationalisms of the 1950s and 1960s and with leftist ideologies, as well as the rise of political Islamist movements. Indeed the essays present rich new approaches to assessing what political participation has meant for women in this region and how emerging national states there have dealt with organized efforts by women to influence the institutions that govern their lives. Designed for courses in Middle East, women's, and cultural studies, Women and Power in the Middle East offers to both students and scholars an excellent introduction to the study of gender in the Arab-Islamic world.

Examining different forms of resistance among Shi'i women in the Middle East and Europe, this book studies the performance of sectarian and gender power relations as expressed in Shi'i ritual practices. It provides a new transnational approach to researching gender agency in contemporary Islamic movements in both the Middle East and Europe.

Conflict, Civil Society, and Women’s Empowerment: Insights from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is a specific study on how civil society organizations (CSOs) foster civic engagement, resilience and women’s empowerment in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.