Bodies, Power and Resistance in the Middle East

The book examines how exercises of power and processes of security 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 focus 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 obscure 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 relate 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.