6 - At the Nexus of Colonialism, Imperialism, and Imbalanced Patriarchies: Narratives and Expressions of Gender Violence in Occupied Palestine

Summary

Chapter VI explores the means through which imperial impositions and military occupation deliberately narrate, interact with, and affect internal dynamics of patriarchy in colonised Palestine – relating this to both articulations and expressions of violence against women within this context. Moving beyond the “essentialising cultural logics” that render patriarchal violence as a ‘static’ and ‘fixed’ component of ‘Palestinian culture’, this chapter thus joins with the pursuit of many Palestinian feminists to examine the complex “interplay between a colonial politics of exclusion and a localised culture of control” as it is narrated and deployed in relation to violence against Palestinian women (Shalhoub-Kervorkian and Daher-Nashif 2013, 298). Yet, I caution against centralising Israel’s military occupation as causal or ‘explanatory’ of internal dynamics of violence, arguing that making this link uncritically risks positioning Palestinian women’s bodies as discursive and material sites upon which an internal patriarchal order ‘in crisis’ can be normatively reclaimed.