Defying "The Plan"

Kim Jezabel Zinngrebe

Description

Living under settler colonialism and patriarchal oppressions, Palestinian women in Israel are expected to operate even the most intimate aspects of their lives according to what some call "The Plan," which dictates everything from clothing, marriage, religion, and sex to how children are born and raised.

In Defying "The Plan," Kim Jezabel Zinngrebe draws from a series of moving interviews to reveal that despite various forms of intertwined oppressions by both the Israeli state and Palestinian society, Palestinian women show defiance by the quotidian choices they make in their own intimate lives under occupation, which, Zinngrebe argues, cannot be perceived as a mere corollary but constitute a pivotal and contested terrain of the struggle between settler and colonized. Defying "The Plan" explores such issues as the segregation of sexual education in Palestine; the politics of dress, menstruation, and tattoos; and the roles of class, feminism, and race. Importantly, she highlights the intersectional experiences of women typically excluded from existing accounts, such as Black Palestinian women, women with disabilities, unmarried and divorced women, Bedouin women, and LGBTQI women.

The stories gathered in Defying "The Plan" trace and unpack settler colonial power at the level of the intimate and native women's various practices of defiance.

Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Translation
Introduction
1. Embodied Citizen Strangers
2. Born with a Plan
3. Defying Bodies
4. Defying Desire
5. Defying Intimate Relations
6. Defying the Plan: Feminist Selves?
Conclusion
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Women's Studies
• Social Science
• HISTORY
• Sociologie, société et politique
• History of the Middle East
• Gender
• Middle East
• Palestine

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 12 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253062529
• Langue: English

Extrait

DEFYING THE PLAN
DEFYING THE PLAN
Intimate Politics among Palestinian Women in Israel

KIM JEZABEL ZINNGREBE
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2022 by Kim Jezabel Zinngrebe
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2022
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-06249-9 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-06250-5 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-06251-2 (e-book)
To Lilith, Veit, and Lovis
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Translation

Introduction
1. Embodied Citizen Strangers
2. Born with a Plan
3. Defying Bodies
4. Defying Desire
5. Defying Intimate Relations
6. Defying the Plan: Feminist Selves?
Conclusion
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A GREAT NUMBER OF PEOPLE have inspired and supported the research and writing of this book-a process that in many ways started almost a decade ago. Since then, the manuscript has undergone many changes as I moved back and forth between Palestine, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
First and foremost, my gratitude goes to all the Palestinian women and men who supported this research and without whose participation, self-evidently, this book would never have been realized. Upon reflection, I have the privilege of being able to say that my fieldwork, from beginning to end, felt like one long, thrilling conversation with (mostly) women who were not only a pleasure to talk with but who, ultimately, opened up their personal lives and homes to me and who supported me and my research by sparing me their valuable time and thoughts. Even though you are far too many to be mentioned by name and many of you prefer not to have your names made public, please know that I appreciate that your sincere support is what drove this book from its initial development from a brief research idea discussed in an nongovernmental organization office in Haifa up until its final write-up as a book manuscript in a small mountain village near Frankfurt. The stories, support, and critical commentaries of my research participants constitute the very fabric of this book, and I am satisfied if I have managed to capture at least a part of the intimate and powerful politics of their daily lives as indigenous women living under Israeli occupation.
Fellow researchers, friends, supervisors, PhD examiners, and anonymous readers have read drafts and given their astute advice over the years-for that I am immensely grateful!
My PhD supervisors at SOAS University of London, were invaluable in preparing me for this book project. At the risk of exaggerating, I want to thank Ruba Salih for being the best supervisor I could have asked for. I hope her remarkable capacity for consistent support, constructive criticism, and motivation is reflected in this book. Her wit and sensitivity made all the stages of my journey as a young researcher a true pleasure. Laleh Khalili and Yair Wallach provided insightful and critical feedback throughout the development of my work, and I thank them for their encouragement and guidance during the years that led to the completion of my doctorate in 2017.
Parts of this book appeared in earlier publications. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in 2019 in volume 9 of the journal Settler Colonial Studies . A number of ideas and arguments made in chapter 1 and chapter 4 appeared in volume 112 of the journal Feminist Review in 2016. Some material of those chapters also appeared in 2015 in the volume Contentious Politics in the Middle East edited by Fawaz Gerges. Many thanks go to the editors and anonymous reviewers of these publications.
The encouragement and assistance of my dear friends Mary Haddad and Rahma Al-Sana were invaluable during my fieldwork, and I am very grateful to them for introducing me to their friends and relatives and for hosting and feeding me for months. I am also indebted to Minem Marouf not only for being a big-hearted and much-cherished friend, but also for always being available and keen to help whenever I bothered him with yet another question about life in Palestine (or life more generally). I thank Magdalena Suerbaum for her unrelenting engagement with and countless discussions about my research throughout the years, but, above all, for our extraordinary friendship.
My research benefited greatly from the conversations with my inspiring and brilliant PhD cohort at the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS. I am particularly grateful to Nydia Swaby, Hila Amit, Akanksha Mehta, and Sabiha Allouche for continually sending me productive vibes of feminist solidarity from both near and afar and making me feel that my research was of importance and value. I would also like to thank Gina Heathcote and Nadje Al-Ali at the Centre for Gender Studies for their continuous support of both my research and me personally throughout the different stages of my PhD.
The research for this book was made possible by Evangelisches Studienwerk Villigst, which not only funded my PhD program and fieldwork but also demonstrated to me time and again that religious institutions can support and encourage critical political research. I have always felt embraced, fortunate, and completely contented among my fellow scholarship holders. Much to my initial surprise, it was within their circle that I had some of the most captivating and radical conversations about politics, sex, and religion.
At Indiana University Press, I wholeheartedly thank Jennika Baines for her unfailing enthusiasm for my book and her enduring flow of encouragement from the beginning. I also thank Sophia Hebert for her continuous support throughout the final stages and her kind understanding whenever I struggled to make a deadline. Moreover, I thank the immensely talented Raya Manaa for providing one of her gripping photographs for the book cover-no other image could be more suitable.
Finally, I thank my much beloved family, my partner, my three children, and my dogs, without whom this book would have been published years ago, but without whom my life would be rather dull. Their love means everything to me. Ultimately, my gratitude goes to everyone who looked after my kids so that I could complete writing this book (during a pandemic).
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION
IN THIS BOOK I LARGELY follow the system of Arabic transliteration as outlined in the guidelines of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) , except for words, names, and places that have standardized spellings in English like Deir Yassin or Bedouin, I use Palestinian-Arabic names of places like al-Naqab (rather than the Negev ) and Bi r as-Sab (rather than Beersheva ) because of the political importance of displaying place names in their original form in the context of the Palestinian displacement. Diacritics are used only to mark the ayn and the hamza (except for initial hamza, which is dropped). Diverging from IJMES standard and in an attempt to better capture pronunciation, I have transcribed words in Al-Naqab Bedouin local dialect as I encountered them during my fieldwork. For Hebrew, I follow the Library of Congress transliteration system. In both languages, I privilege the colloquial over the literary spelling. All translations in the book are my own, except when specifically stated otherwise.
DEFYING THE PLAN
INTRODUCTION
MY HOMELAND IS MY MOTHER S WOMB : THE STORY OF THE RESEARCH
Even though this research has undergone considerable developments throughout the last years, its point of origin can be traced back to the afternoon of Wednesday, September 8, 2011. Back then, I- the new German intern from London -was waiting in a small, Spartan office of a Palestinian 1 feminist organization for my new boss, Huda, 2 a renowned feminist activist, founder, and director of the organization, to finish a telephone call so that I could find out about my upcoming work tasks. As Huda was known among her staff as a real busy bee and difficult to get hold of, I knew that it was likely that I would have to wait for a while. I made myself comfortable surveying the office decorations: a handful of cards and stickers in Hebrew, Arabic, and English were scattered over a small part of the wall. I could make out only one of the Hebrew stickers, which read sa ar be-beitsiot hu sa ar be-evarim (egg trade is organ trade). Pacing back and forth across the room, while babbling bouncily on her telephone in fluent Hebrew and playing with one of her big signature earrings, Huda winked at me from time to time to assure me that she was doing her best to finish the call as soon as possible. After the long-anticipated lehitraot (goodbye), I expected us to toss some broad ideas around together, considering that I was completely new to the subject of Palestinian women s rights in Israel.
Instead, Huda surprised me with a concrete proposal. I think you should write a paper about citizenship, she said forthrightly, as if she had already made up her mind about it. I couldn t help but look off guard as her curious, smirking eyes searched my face for a reaction. Citizenship? I enquired. Yes, our citizenship here in Israel, Huda responded. I thought a lot about this with the demonstrations going on in Tel Aviv, you know. Where are we ? Where are the Arabs? Shouldn t we be among the first to protest against social inequality? Knowing H