A Gendered Politics of Life: The Feminization of Resistance, Social Reproduction, Palestinian Embroidery–women’s Work Toward Surviving and Thriving

Rasmieyh Abdelnabi

Advisor: Manjusha Nair, PhD, Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Committee Members: Johanna Bockman, Amal Amireh

Online Location, Zoom: https://to.gmu.edu/AbdelnabiDefense
November 25, 2024, 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM

Abstract:

This dissertation explores the politics of life and builds on the work of scholars Didier Fassin and Ilana Feldman, who investigate a politics of life within humanitarian structures. Fassin was the first to coin the term “politics of life” to refer to an understanding of politics not from the outside (i.e., the state or institutions), but from the inside and “in the flesh of the everyday experience[s]” (Fassin 2009:57). Feldman argued humanitarianism is a site in which most of the actors within it claim to act outside of partisan politics, even though the politics of humanitarianism “shapes subjects, alters societies, and enforces or disrupts geopolitical inequalities”; is a space where people “act politically” (Feldman 2018:4). Through ethnography, this dissertation utilizes Palestinian embroidery as a space to provide a decolonial epistemology on women’s work/labor, political economy, and sovereignty that goes beyond Western and feminist liberal ideology that has limited the ways in which we understand women’s labor, autonomy, public spaces, and politics.

Embroidery serves as material expression of Palestinian experience, history, and identity. Broadly, my project turns to Palestine to better understand a global trend regarding the feminization of resistance and a turn toward informal politics to counter the limitations of formal politics in the face of women experiencing dispossession, loss of autonomy, and a need to survive within systems of oppression by using the very objects women create that enable cultural continuity in the face of settler colonialism’s erasure and dispossession. I argue that a gendered politics of life is a form of feminization of resistance by way of social reproduction, and is a politics that seeks to understand how ordinary women operate within their everyday lives and unintentionally “act politically” by not only ensuring the immediate survival of themselves and families, but also as an act of refusal in actively stopping the erasure of their communities and nation. The current scholarship on the feminization of resistance and social reproduction focuses on women’s roles in formal political structures and institutions and on women’s resistance to neoliberal capitalism as it relates to providing the basics: childbearing, food, shelter, safety, job security/fair benefits and caring for children and/or the community (e.g. Zaman & Tubajon 2001; Motta 2013, 2014; López 2013; Federici 2019), which is incorporated within this dissertation,  but also moves beyond this analysis. There is a different means by which social reproduction influences life and politics; which is through the production of culture and new subjectivities. This strand of social reproduction is acknowledged in the literature (e.g., Federici 2019:5); but it has not been fully explored or researched. Using women’s embroidery to study this topic allows me to give space and voice to women usually overlooked or ignored because they work in their homes on a feminine “hobby.” This dissertation shows the ways in which Palestinian embroidery serves as a transformative medium for Palestinians’ social and political lives across the world and against the ruptures created by settler colonialism, serving as Indigenous refusal against erasure and dispossession.

Please join us on Zoom: https://to.gmu.edu/AbdelnabiDefense