Subversion: an embodied means of anti-colonist resistance on Palestinian women political prisoners pdf
Year: 2018
Author: Natalie Hannuneh
Supervisor: Lena Meari
Discussion Committee: Amira Silmi & Rami Salameh
Abstract
The focal point of the thesis is to illustrate the ways the “subalterened” speak and write their narrations of history. On one hand, most of the Western/Orientalist/Zionist discourses portray Palestinian women political prisoners as agentless and voiceless victims of Palestinian patriarchy. On the other hand, many of nationalist literature on Palestinian women political prisoners focus on the oppressive Zionist tactics that are done upon the prisoners’ bodies. Although it’s very important to study the systems of power that are constantly trying to discipline and punish Palestinian women political prisoners’ bodies, this research focuses on the ways these bodies speak back. In other words, it studies the ways Palestinian women fight the colonist inside Zionist jails using their bodies as a strategic means of resistance. Therefore, an Interpretivist qualitative research approach is adopted to carry out the analysis of the collected data throughout semi-structured interviews conducted with a sample of 9 Palestinian women who were detained in Zionist jails between 2014 and 2017. Consequently, the collected data contained the narratives of these women. The research followed two methods to interpret the collected data. The first one is the paradigmatic mode of analysis which seeks to find general features and common categories in the data. The second method is the narrative mode of analysis which basically attends to the particular characteristics of human actions that take a place in a specific setting.
Eventually, the research concluded that Palestinian women political prisoners use subversion as an embodied means of anti-colonial resistance to challenge the tactics that are done upon them, while simultaneously creating fluid and agent subjectivities. Their narratives convey a sense of irreducible humanity and demonstrate a counter-hegemonic kind of knowledge
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