Women’s Everyday Resistance and the Infrapolitics of Ṣumūd

Abstract

Chapter 3 deals with women’s less spectacular strategies of quotidian resistance and survival—ṣumūd, as they are often referred to in Palestine. Classic political analysis might consider the silent, ordinary acts that women practice on a daily basis uninteresting, or irrelevant for political change. But the fact that women’s everyday resistance is largely covert does not render it apolitical or without broader significance. The Israeli occupation and settler-colonial policies reach into and dominate the very fine grain of Palestinian everyday life; the everyday and the ordinary today has become a major site where politics is enacted. This chapter argues that women with their daily mundane struggles resist not only the physical occupation of their land and people, but they also the occupation of their mind.