Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Fairchild, Emily

Area of Concentration

Sociology

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to understand how feminist literary practice can navigate contested membership within Palestinian Nationalist discourse. In particular, I am interested in the way the content of Sawt-Al-Nisa (Voice of Women) magazine responds to the questioning of Palestinian women’s nationalist credentials during the Second Intifada on the basis of their lack of participation in the militarized resistance. Employing qualitative content analysis, I examine the ways Palestinian women imagine themselves as nationalist actors, how self-definition tools are employed to navigate contested membership, and whether that can qualify as resistance from the margins. Two themes emerged from the analysis of the data: 1) Sawt-Al-Nisa reimagines Palestinian nationalism through multiple processes of self-definition: historicization of women’s involvement, contemporary documentation of women’s contributions to the Second Intifada, critique of and rewriting/ redrafting the national narrative. 2) Sawt-Al-Nisa functions as a space for the promotion of feminist consciousness and identification through its feminist reading of modern Palestinian Society, through its facilitation of exchanging Palestinian feminist survival strategies and by engaging members of the feminist movement in critical discourse. The content of the magazine, organized by the two themes, exemplifies a form of resistance emerging from the margins. The findings of this study add an alternative to existing scholarship on the resistance of Palestinian women in particular, by identifying feminist literary practice as a means through which Palestinian women navigate the double burden of occupation and patriarchy.

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