Women’s Popular Resistance

Abstract

Chapter 2 discusses women’s popular resistance activism. Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with Palestinian female protestors, it traces the forms, meanings, and impact of women’s involvement in demonstrations against the illegal Israeli separation wall. Such embodied protest actions hold particular gender-specific meanings: by dramatically putting their bodies on the line, women resist the Israeli occupation, but they also challenge essentialist discourses that reduce women to biological and cultural reproducers of the nation and counter the international agenda’s disciplining project of confining Palestinian women’s political spaces to that of joint Palestinian-Israeli peace initiatives. By doing politics differently, Palestinian female resistance activists thus challenge classic liberal notions of the political and enact what Nancy Fraser in her critique of Habermas termed “subaltern counterpublics.”